If you're at all interested in tiling window managers, I can't recommend regolith enough. It's built on top a minimal ubuntu install and gnome-settings-daemon, so it gives you most of the non-window manager desktop stuff you would expect. At first, the distro was all the same stuff I would uninstall/install to roll my own environment. But they keep working on it and expanding the docs.

The only difficult part for me, is that they change the i3 config defaults. So often, instead of checking the i3 docs, I have to read my local config first.