Introducing stronger dependencies on systemd

With systemD, the alternatives have a curve because so much IBM money and monopolization has gone into it. But systems using OpenRC(alpine) or SysV(MX linux, Devuan) work great in my experience. there are other init systems like runit (void linux) also seem to work great too, I just haven't used them.

As for desktop environments, the choice is very easy. Because there are simply better options. For normal users, I always suggest KDE Plasma or XFCE, Cosmic is still in development but looks very promising, cinnamon also looks great, but I don't use it (I know it's a gnome2 fork). But for power users, the choice of WMs are pretty trivial. i3, xmonad, qtile, niri, leftwm, etc.

The experience of using a WM instead of a full DE is incomparable for professional and power users. That is why I LOVE XFCE because it is modular. you can use parts of the XFCE ecosystem in any WM (power manager, theme manager, file manager etc.) or just replace xfce wm with your WM of choice (although I don't recommend this).

gnome is an IBM company?

Not parent, but...

There is a rich world of window managers, if you run a proper distro with X11. IceWM for example is a great building block for your own desktop, you can combine it with the file manager you prefer, or use a terminal instead for that, use it with a dock, tray and a helper like conky instead of the default task bar. The capabilities of real WMs are great, to pin windows (permanently), have workspaces, give overviews - and that's before going into the auto tiling direction.

But that's only if you want to have something custom. Otherwise KDE would be the default alternative to Gnome, then XFCE or LXQT for smaller desktop environments.

This is the back-end plague which is everywhere in free software. The idea is that whatever "it" is, adding support for "it" is "just another back-end" . Take cairo for example, it has or had back-ends for gdk, win32, png, svg, html canvas, pdf, postscript, opengl, xlib, quartz, etc. Only a few of them are actually usable and support has been removed for several others over the years. The number of sound back-ends on Linux is uncountable: ALSA, OSS, OpenAl, PulseAudio, Jack, Esound, PipeWire... It's never "just another back-end" because every back-end needs continuous testing and maintenance.

Poettering when designing systemd wisely, WISELY decided to not go the back-end route. Other free software hackers learn the hard way that multiple back-ends are expensive and rarely worth the cost.

For all worried check out xfce. It works, is light, is customizable, has gtk responsiveness (I find Qt click and drag and drop downs odd) Only downside maybe is no Wayland support yet.