I'm curious what you find distracting in Gnome? Unless you're running in Classic mode the newer versions got rid of everything except the top menu bar and that

I'm curious what you find distracting in Gnome? Unless you're running in Classic mode the newer versions got rid of everything except the top menu bar and that is less busy than it used to be. The default launcher works very well using the keyboard only, I actually quite like it (though there are definitely other things I don't like about the Gnome defaults).