That's exactly why I left SuSE about 24 years ago! Dependencies in
rpms... I now run Ubuntu on my servers, having got there via Gentoo.
I'm still running Ubuntu on servers but the annoyances haven't really hit me there. Sooner or later I'm going to find that things I need are going to have shifted to snaps but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it!
For a desktop, which by your mention of Unity it seems you're looking
for, I can't recommend Linux Mint Cinnamon enough. I've been using it as
my daily driver for more than 10 years now, and it just keeps getting
better.
Yes desktop - for now anyway although I use Ubuntu on servers as much because I run it on my desktop as the other way around, so we'll see.
I'm going to have to give Cinnamon a proper go. How well will it behave in a VM for testing? (I can give it plenty of RAM/CPU).