Thing is, a lot of good apps use gtk and so you have to put up with adwaita even if you don’t normally run a Gnome desktop.
Likewise, if you’re writing an application you have to handle gnome’s nonstandard way of doing window decorations for it to run on gnome shell.





Cinnamon. Desktop UI peaked in the Gnome 2/Windows XP era and anything after that is bloat for the sake of bloat.
Might try kde plasma though, if I can make it behave the same.