@jamespthomas Pick a distro and go! So much of the "Stop using X use Y instead" stuff is algorithmically-driven nonsense, so I stay out of the habit of making straight recommendations.

Personally, I use Debian on most of my machines, and the installer lets you choose between GNOME, KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, XFCE, and probably a few others I'm not mentioning. I personally like KDE Plasma out of that group but only because it's very customizable (perhaps to a fault).