It's definitely possible. But since OP said "There has to be a simple OS that just works", there are few things i'd like to point.
1. Conflict possibility between DE or default app comes with DE. You might mention you could just remove GNOME, but there's risk you accidentally remove important application or library.
2. I have doubt there won't be any problem when you perform major update (e.g. 20.04 LTS to 22.04 LTS).
Linux Mint fits the bill nicely, for this reason.
Yeah this looks good:
https://www.linuxmint.com/download_all.phpHas anyone tried Xfce? I've always used this environment, it is the one used by the super lightweight distros, should be the less fancier and thus snappier one.
Not sure why they've blocked their page to Tor tho, had to use a proxy on top to get it.
Does anyone here recommend some "first thing to do after installing" tips?
Something that I always want to be sure is that no temporal stuff is left somewhere. I remember with Elementary OS, it used some sort of temporal backups for unsaved text files for instance, so if you wrote anything you didn't want to keep, and you didn't know this, there would be traces of what you wrote elsewhere. These things are what I really want to keep under control. I want to know that when I delete a file, this file is not saved elsewhere because reasons. This is why I do full disk encryption to begin with, but still, I want to know those things are happening.