Dan comes in with his own GNOME Hot take...
I wanted to chime in on your discussion of the GNOME desktop and I 100% agree: the GNOME developers are building a terrific product for a market that is not there. I have recently tried out Fedora Silverblue and the default GNOME experience is pretty good out of the box. But I always reach a point where things start driving me nuts.
What really annoys me about this though, is that this is not a new problem. It has been like that for the past decade!
Anyway, I definitely agree here: GNOME would be a terrific environment if desktop Linux was a thing outside of developers. I could imagine my Grandma using something like Fedora Silverblue or openSUSE MicroOS Desktop with GNOME 40 after I explained it to her. But beyond this niche (that is already in the Windows world, because that's what they used), I don't see anyone using a vanilla GNOME *at all*.
Have a great week and a successful and quick move for Michael!