linuxmemes

I’d hate to select an ultra specific customized version that gets abandoned by the maintainers in a year or two, I generally run machines for about 8 years.

TLDR (Apologies for the crazy long comment): Basically, I say that if you want peace of mind the project isn't going to be abandoned; choose one of the most popular distro's and one of the most popular DE's. And I reccomend a bunch of options for Distro's and DE's you might like to use.

That makes sense. If you want the peace of mind that the distro or Desktop Environment isn't going to be abandoned in a couple of years; that's why you go with one of the popular ones; they aren't going away any time soon or the foreseeable future. The distro developers usually customise the included Desktop Environment a bit to cater to their specific audience. Choose a popular distro, and choose one of the officially maintained flavours they make available, rather then a community maintained one, which is much more likely to be abandoned after a couple years. Here's an example of the popular desktop environments:

KDE Plasma has been around since 1998 & developed since 1996, and is regularly developed, improved, and updated.

Cinnamon has been around since 2011 and is developed by the Linux Mint distro developers; Linux Mint being one of the top 3 most popular Linux distributions; not going away anytime soon. It's also regularly updated too. And since Linux Mint are the devs; It's the main, most supported flavour available for Linux Mint.

GNOME I'm not a fan of it personally. It's been around since 1999, developed since 1997; GNOME is associated with Ubuntu and is one of, if not the most popular desktop environments available; of course this is also regularly updated too, and not going away anytime soon.

Mate (pronounced mah-tay) has been around since 2011; it was forked from an old version of GNOME due to the backlash GNOME was getting at the time for drastic changes they were making to their own DE; and made for people who preferred the GNOME 2 design. Again: regularly worked on and updated

Budgie released in 2014 and is developed by Solus distro developers. In my opinion, it's absolutely beautiful with it's minimalistic yet modern visual design, but I can see why it wouldn't be for everyone; still worth it to check out.

Why don't you setup a Linux virtual machine on your Windows PC, install a bunch of different flavours of different distro's, and try the different Desktop Environment's out for yourself? You might surprise yourself and find one that you adore the look of. I know from experience that using the environments themselves is way different to simply looking at screenshots or watching video's.

The best options for distro's to try out imo are:

Linux Mint (Debian based; probably the best beginner friendly distro out there, just about everything is doable without the terminal)

Manjaro (Arch based; made to be an arch-like distro that's a beginner-to-linux but familiar-with-computers, and average-user friendly distro. A common misconception is that it's very unstable and prone to breakage: this is not true anymore and was more an issue in it's early days)

Pop!_OS (Debian based; brilliant for gamers and average computer users; they use GNOME, but System76 (the devs) are working on their own Desktop Environment written from scratch to replace GNOME; last I checked, there haven't been any screenshots revealed of it.

Those are my top picks but I know my small list is missing many others of the great and popular distro's. Making sure you can have a system that's supported for years to come is easy if you pick one of the popular distro's. If you don't want to update the system for years at a time; don't choose a distro with a rolling-release update system (like Arch, Manjaro, Garuda, EndeavourOS etc. which is basically anything Arch-based) If that's how you use your system; Linux Mint with the Cinnamon, Mate, or XFCE flavour is a perfect choice. And if you want to, you ARE able to install any other DE on Linux Mint even if it's not officially supported, and you can have as many DE's installed at once as you want; though that will all require the terminal.