I’m really easily distracted and have things to do when I use my home PC(s). So gnome is really the only thing I can reliably set up and not spend all my time customising. Also, Ubuntu was my first distro (tbh it was Kali Linux but we don’t talk about my larp era) and I liked the DE from that.
Its not like I don’t customise it mind you, but that’s limited to changing the default wallpaper, installing blur my shell and dash to panel, then adding custom icons, usually Tela circle. After that though I don’t touch anything in the DE. If I’m on a laptop, I go full Ubuntu and put the dock on the left vertical side of the screen
In comparison I once spent hours customising KDE to look and sound like windows 98, only to realise I didn’t like it, to change it to something completely different 3 more times. I did not pass the assignment I was meant to be doing. Its fun but I’ll do anything to procrastinate.
Can attest also, I have an Intel i5 and a rtx3050 running cachyos in a Gigabyte laptop and it’s flawless. Power saving is that of a gaming laptop, I get 2 hours of charge when not gaming and not on AC, considerably less when gaming performance is required. But I only got slightly longer from windows 10 when I needed that for something, and I stripped that down to the absolute basics. If I right click on a game on Linux I get a pop-up asking about using my discrete gpu, otherwise it assumes. I have used Wayland and Xorg within the last few years, both are fine.