@louis I have been using Archlinux for so long I do not remember using anything else for my workstation or my laptop (still use FreeBSD for my servers and Ubuntu LTS for production professional work because it’s the path of least resistance despite being a shitty distribution).
I have neither the time nor the interest in tinkering with my OS (I had my Gentoo phase a long time ago thank you very much), so a distribution with up-to-date packages and very little opinions (I’m looking at you Debian) suits me perfectly.
Also, yes, Gnome and KDE are self inflicted pains, using i3 or equivalent is a game changer.