Comment by LexiMax

This might not be a popular opinion, but in my experience stock GNOME is quite the polished experience.

In the grand pantheon of my experience using operating systems, Snow Leopard-era macOS is probably my favorite, mostly due to how smoothly everything worked and the degree to which it got out of my way once I learned the ropes, but GNOME circa Fedora 30 was a close second.

I say stock because I also remember trying out Ubuntu-flavored GNOME at around the same time and the comparison was stark. It felt like Cannonical went out of their way to tweak the environment in ways that sound good on paper, but just added papercuts and made the overall experience less stable.

I also remember trying Manjaro at around the same time. On first boot, the welcome popup that was designed to come out of the taskbar instead popped out of the top left corner of the screen.