This is easy to accomplish. > I fondly remember GNOME 2 days. It was the best Linux experience I've ever had. You can just use MATE, which is just GNOME 2 for

This is easy to accomplish. > I fondly remember GNOME 2 days. It was the best Linux experience I've ever had. You can just use MATE, which is just GNOME 2 forked and continued. > KDE with infinite number of settings that put me into depression the moment I open their control panel Okay, then don't do that. KDE's defaults are fine. The fact that options exist is not harmful to you. > or those weird tiled WMs which I have zero interest in, because I almost never split my screen, all my windows are maximised 99% of time. You can use i3/sway with workspace_layout tabbed and have all your windows maximized unless you explicitly force them to do something else.