@GremR Thats good to hear. You can skip doing updates, I’m pretty sure there is an opt out button “not now” or something similar. You can actually skip that whole quick setup menu and do it the old fashioned manual way via Raspberry Pi Configuration etc.
I’m no expert on this but I do believe as long as you don’t do a dist-upgrade or full-upgrade you will stay on Stretch.
I usually use the Raspbian with Desktop image, the one between full and lite. Even on headless setups like my Pirate Radio. I like doing things from the GUI versus command line. Once I’m all done I go into Raspberry Pi Configuration and set it to boot to command line instead of the desktop. Make sure you select the auto log on option. It will boot up quicker and run a little lighter faster. And if you ever need to go back to the GUI just run raspi-config from the command line and switch it back to boot to Desktop. Or run sudo startx.
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