[tde-users] drop-in ubuntu replacements?

greets, everybody . . . i've been away, working on a book project, but now i need to turn to this list. i've used ubuntu for well over a decade, happily. canonical has gone kind of flaky -- first, update messages got salted with announcements that they're holding back some security updates unless i register with them (and we all know where that leads). now i updates my second machine, running 2004LTS, and got a pop-up saying support will end in 43 days unless i upgrade to 2204. until now, upgrading was simply a matter of changing the version name in the sources list, then doing the usual update/upgrade thing. usually i had to do it a couple of times to get everything, but it worked. my desktop is pretty elaborately configured. a clean install would take a week i don't have, followed by a year of every so often finding something that no longer works. so . . . i'm hoping to find what amounts to a ubuntu clone but free of whatever it is that canonical is up to. by this, i mean a distro that will let me change the version name (and probably the server) in the sources list (actually, in synaptic), and let 'er rip, with package names and so on being the same to the extent that it won't break everything. there used to be a lot of -buntus -- for a while i was using kubuntu until kde went its goofy way and ubuntu dropped support for it. i see now that there is something called "trisquel," and that seems a likely choice, if package naming conventions are the same -- i know that version names aren't. anybody tried it? i's do debian, but that would take me a week or two to fix the stuff broken by their politics, even as i'm trying to fix what canonical is breaking for business reasons. i do not want snap or appimage, just plain old deb. what's the right answer? is there a solid non-ubuntu ubuntu that without too much crowbar use runs TDE? thanks in advance. -- dep Pictures: http://www.ipernity.com/doc/depscribe/album Column: https://ofb.biz/author/dep/