I've tried Pop OS, but it seems little more than a GNOME theme to me. I also don't understand why they didn't pick (or better yet fork) elementary OS, which is

I've tried Pop OS, but it seems little more than a GNOME theme to me. I also don't understand why they didn't pick (or better yet fork) elementary OS, which is the only good-looking Linux distro that has a different enough vision to justify the duplicate effort to create another distro. Personally, I think that GNOME is completely unusable. Pop OS is too close to GNOME. elementary looks great but its minimalism is similar to that of recent Apple--where so many features are removed that the app stops being useful, and huge compromises are made just so the thing looks good, ignoring that it has a purpose. I'm using an heavily-modified Xfce install and I can actually manage to be productive.