> seems the land of the Linux desktop has abandoned GNOME My perception has been the opposite. The distros that I see people using are Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch

> seems the land of the Linux desktop has abandoned GNOME My perception has been the opposite. The distros that I see people using are Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch. I use NixOS and Gnome is the recommended DE. Gnome has sane defaults and in my experience does actually "just work" on a surprisingly wide variety of modern hardware.