VanillaOS is very promising, but it has Gnome as the only DE option unfortunately.
I installed it just to see if maybe I was wrong about gnome being shit and even if it still is maybe vanilla is good enough to put up with it. I never fucking learn.
There’s little to know customization outside extensions which are very powerful but prone to breaking. The gone mindset is to support basically one workflow and to make changes as it needs fit regardless of stability. Personally I like this, it prevents things from getting stuck in the past. Plus I’m not one for extreme desktop ricing.
Edit: also I’m a huge fan of declarative systems like nix, and with little to no support for layout config outside of their GUI tool it introduces and unknown variable for me
its a more locked down experience, if you pretend the extension store doesn’t exist. That and hdr and vrr are somewhat not done yet (probably done in a couple updates) while kde has most new implementations done quicker. I will say there is a level of polish to gnome that kde sacrifices, but like polish some people just don’t consider it their priority. tldr: its personal preference.
Everything that people try to convince me is good about it just feels so counter intuitive. It also looks like it should be touch friendly, but I tried it on steam deck and it just absolutely wasn’t. We have decades of touch interface design on phones and tablets yet somehow it’s worse than the flop tablets that came before ipad. But to each their own I suppose. Some people absolutely love it and it works for them. That’s a big part of open source computing, one can chose the desktop environment with the most unlikeable devs if it makes them happy.
Anyway spin up a vm when you get a chance and try it. Try all of them if you can find the time. I find a lot of them kinda nostalgic and I really like tiling wm’s for feeling like a power nerd and making my computer completely unusable to my friends. Mostly I just use kde though.
It’s very minimalist and the project ditched the Windows-style approach some years ago. Personally, I’ve grown to love it and other DEs feel bloated now.
To each their own 🤷♂️
