I understand the appeal for sticking with what you know (because ease-of-use is most often just "what I'm used to"), but I don't really find the modern Gnome UI and desktop problematic. It has some pretty big annoyances, in terms of notifications (some of which are seemingly impossible to disable), and the screen dimming thing that it does when using any menus (which also effects the secondary display, meaning you simply can't use a Gnome desktop for any professional video or presentation task).<p>Nonetheless, I'm not choosing a distro based on the desktop; Fedora has spins for every major desktop I'd want to use (though no good tiling WM options, with good integration, unfortunately, but nobody seems to build something like that).<p>I do like that they're building based on the LTS release of Ubuntu. The life cycle of a standard Ubuntu release is too short for comfort, IMHO. (Fedora, too, though security updates stick around long enough for me.)