1. Ubuntu based, since I know where everything is. I don't mean to knock other great distros like Arch, etc.. but I'd rather do my stuff than try to figure out another package manager or another file system layout.
2. Customizable. I make my environment look a bit like windows, with the task bar and all. Not because I love windows, but because I have two laptops, one windows and one linux, and I need a bit of a seamless transition. I am sure if my other laptop was a fruit, I'd want my linux machine to resemble a fruit.
3. I need my desktop right click context menu, with a command line option.
For the longest time I used Xubuntu. I still think Xfce is the best out there, but its glacial rate of movement made me look in other places. It is falling behind in some things such as multi-monitor support with docking stations.
I now use Ubuntu 17.10 with Gnome shell. I was able to make it look almost like my Xfce setup. I had to turn off Wayland, since it was causing gnome to crash randomly on wake from sleep and close all my apps. It is also far less customizable than xfce, and some things are unexpectedly buggier (the terminal window loses cut and paste abilities randomly, and I cannot replace the console shortcut in the desktop context menu with Terminator).
I may yet go back to Xubuntu. Not sure.