Just use KDE Plasma

Tried it. You supposedly can customize it any way you want, but after struggling for like an hour trying to make it look clean, I wondered why I was trying to force that. The UI in KDE is not clean. It’s messy and has exposed many options I would never use. People love to hate on GNOME but I think they’re only doing that because they know it’s so popular. And it’s popular for a reason.

I don’t hate on gnome but coming from windows the UX was so unintuitive i had to switch to a different session without a DE to get rid of gnome. I’m sure it’s learnable and then depending on your preferences pretty great.

I also don’t think plasma is messy though. To me there’s nothing worse than a system hiding options out of the assumption that I don’t need them (see also: windows over time, which is a big part of why I made the switch to linux in the first place).