I honestly think these things are often used by people just to make themselves feel better. The amount of difference that a full fledged DE like Gnome or KDE us

I honestly think these things are often used by people just to make themselves feel better. The amount of difference that a full fledged DE like Gnome or KDE use it mostly just RAM and its 2023 I mean how old and how less ram do people actually have even in "old" machines. I think unless your are SERIOUSLY limited there is really no reason to use some minimalist DE (OS) and it all comes down to DE mostly, so I would if anything rather use some very established Linux like Lubuntu, Arch with a smaller DE over all these niche specialized minimalist distros. I have a feeling everyone and their grandma starts a linux distro and sells it based on a screenshot on how the default desktop looks and how much ram is used after boot. There are like 1000 Linux distros based on Ubuntu and I think most of them make no sense. Official flavors do make sense Kubuntu/Lubuntu/... I never got Mint, clinging so hard on Gnome 2. There are plenty of gnome 3 extensions that make things exactly as you like it. I use Material Shell and its the best DE experience I ever had, even though its pretty buggy. I am exited for the authors new project veshell https://github.com/free-explorers/veshell https://github.com/free-explorers/veshell a Wayland compositor that does the same thing without Gnome.