I'm out of step with most of the rest of the world. I like Gnome. I like that I can support users (write cross platform user guides) with potentially different underlying OS's depending on role, support requirements, and age.
Consider Debian Stretch. It's very current, and will be as stable as a stable thing for years (but will gradually fall behind the leading edge the longer you use it). It's hard for me to judge how fast/slow it is. On this machine there is absolutely no slowdown of anything (but it's a very capable machine). If you need something more corporate, well out of date, but equally stable - and RPM based (and potentially the same platform as your webhosting or VPS), with a potential support option, then possibly Centos 7 (this is an edge useage case, I might be the only one...).
I'm currently debian on the desktop (it's more up to date AND more stable than Ubuntu 16.04), peppermint on the laptop. Centos in the cloud. I started on Suze, never got on with it. I'm currently using fedora atomic for K8's cluster builds. I find fedora itself a bit unfinished sometimes, and I have grown wary of rolling update distributions because it seems that something is always broken (it might be me).
This is the great thing for me about linux, you can tailor the tools to the job.