You ...do know there are countless desktop environments and window managers just an apt-get away right? If that's too much for you, you could have literally chosen any other flavor. My mother has been happily using xubuntu for years. If she can manage, I think you can too.
Has that happened to you? Is that still a problem?
And yeah, the way settings work on Desktop Linux can lead to all kinds of weird stuff if you start actively using multiple environments. Should changing your keyboard layout in one DE affect all the others? Well, wait, which of multiple ways did you accomplish that change in keyboard layout? Should it affect bare terminals, outside the window server? Should some of those methods affect all of them, but other methods not? Which one "wins"? Was this other thing a DE setting, or an X-Window setting? Or neither? Or was it Wayland—wait a minute, some of these DEs run under Wayland and some under X-Window! Gee, surely that won't cause any settings conflicts or surprises.
You can read the rest of what I posted instead of assuming I never did any of those things.
>I hate it, which is why I don't use it. Ubuntu got the closest for me, but the owner's refusal to allow users to move that taskbar to the bottom of the screen made me give up on it altogether. And unless it's a supported distro, I don't want it. Been burned too many times by pet projects that end up being abandoned. The other thing is that in all my years of using Windows and MacOS, I have NEVER had an issue where an upgrade borked being able to log into the desktop. This has happened more times than I remember on Linux.