Hot take

Ha! Yeah, I remember that phase. I was planning to install LXDE as my first distro, simply because I thought the wallpaper looked cool.

I agree - was switching to Fedora about month and a half ago, and only learned about KDE vs Gnome like a week ago, when I was reinstaling to Nobara to fix some NVIDIA issues.

I did hear terms like KDE or Gnome thrown around, but never really realized that it's actually and important choice. And once you add X11 vs Wayland to the mix, it's suddenly so confusing I just subconsciously choose to ignore that choice and went with whatever the OS installed for me. I though that DE chouse is similar to X11 vs Wayland choice, i.e something tha is more about back-end than front-end, and didn't realize that's literally how your OS UI looks and controls, instead of how it works in the background (which I now know is what X11 vs Wayland is actually about)

Turned out I really don't like Gnome (Which was default for Fedora), but love KDE, which was thankfully a default for Nobara.

So, if you're ever recommending Linux to someone, be it in a comment or somwhere else, or someone is asking for a recommended distro, please include a short paragraph about the importance of choosing the correct DE, and explanation of what it is and that you can change it!

Yeah hi that's me - I just use pop_os and everything works so I just roll with it