I'm looking for a replacement distro. for the very reliable (for me anyway!) Xubuntu 16.04.3.   I tried Xubuntu 18.04.1 the other day and ran into a complete screen freeze with only the mouse cursor working though it could not do anything.  Luckily, I was able to use my phone to find a key combination & sudo command for the terminal which let me restart the pc.   This install had about 435 mb of updates & all I was doing was trying to click on a mp4 video which should have opened with VLC.

This screen freeze seems to be a very common one that has been around ever since 18.04 was released last year.   Anyway, random screen freezes make a distro a non starter for me.  I can put up with crappy fonts, hopeless software centres, unhelpful user interfaces, but screen freezing is a no no.  I cannot remember ever having a screen freeze when using Xubuntu 16.04.3, Windows 7 or Windows 10.

In April Xubuntu 16.04 will only get 'core' updates and nothing related to XFCE.  So at that time I can either carry on using Xubuntu 16.04, use the standard Ubuntu 16.04 which will get full updates for another 2 years, maybe give Mint 19.1 XFCE a good trial, or reinstall W7 or W10 from images.   So I have plenty of options I guess!  (For those who read my rants you might remember that I said I was done with Windows 7.  It turned out that I still had a printout of the Windows 7 product key so I was able to download another iso image & get it installed.)

Reading between the lines it might be that the Ubuntu desktop is not getting the same care and attention since Canonical made redundant many of the people who worked on the Unity desktop.