It's what I'm about to be installing after a decade on the Ubuntu desktop. The recent snap fiasco is just the final nail in the coffin. The trifecta of SystemD, Gnome3, and SnapD means that I can just use Windows with WSL if I wanted a distro that is maximally intransparent and pushing things onto me (saying this without satire). Actually, gnome3 is really the worst regression here, and it being so strongly tied in to SystemD makes it an easy target to get rid of.
Other contenders I've been looking into: Void Linux, Slackware, and the BSDs (I used to run FreeBSD in the late 1990s/early 2000s). At one point there was even a variant of Debian (userspace) running on FreeBSD, which however was abandonded due to SystemD and cgroups/namespaces invading too much of Debian.
