Hacker News Reader

Anything with XFCE - you'd probably do well with Xubuntu.

This is XFCE in 2003: https://cdn.xfce.org/about/screenshots/4.2-3.jpg

This is XFCE today: https://cdn.xfce.org/about/tour/4.12/xfwm4-tiling-small.png

Dunno if XFCE qualifies for "frequent small releases" though :)

What you want is a Rolling Release Distro, like Arch or Gentoo, then you can add whatever GUI you want on top of it, I like XFCE as a sibling comment mentioned.

Another good example of a rolling release distro is OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. It has less of a DIY culture than Arch or Gentoo and the installer will install a graphical desktop by default so arguably it is closer to what the parent poster was asking about.

Regarding UI changes, minimalist Window Managers and Desktop Environments for *nix tend to work like that. They stick to their base paradigms and rarely, if ever change, once considered stable.

XFCE has been already been mentioned. But Openbox, dwm, awesome, etc... all could fit.

Note that it's expected, and assumed, that the user can switch to these more conservative UIs if they prefer, even if the base distro defaults to only one.