with arch it's relatively easy given enough experience to build for someone absolutely minimal desktop environment which will run you a browser and that's it and it will be rock solid even with rolling release updates because there's nothing to break.
every time I've tried "out of the box" desktop experience of ubuntu and likes it's been atrocious with a lot of moving parts.
yeah, in a few well-marketed cities you usually find on postcards. "Europe has great public transportation, I was in Munich last week...", right, because whole continent = one city.
In majority of the cities and countryside it's either get a car or get fucked.