I left ubuntu for xubuntu because the latter needs less resources.
Today I found out xubuntu started spamming me and I don’t like that.
what distro can I use that allows for libreoffice, vlc, tbb, okular, pdfarranger, hexchat, gimp, ocr… with no ads?
This is the answer. Current stable Debian already has the latest release of Xfce (4.18); and for recent gui apps there’s flatpak.
For packages like syncthing you can enable official apt repos to get the latest versions.
Other packages for which the latest versions are desirable though the flatpak versions get a bit too finicky (like vim & emacs), you can compile from source. It’s not hard, even for a newbie.