With non locked down hardware, your options are always limited by hubris.

I love gnome too and after messing up with KDE I learned not to go hard on customizing it. I run KDE on my school laptop that sees 50% of the workload and it’s very nice after I set up all the shortcuts and screen edges to work the same as they do on gnome (took me like 5 mins in the middle of a downtime during a lecture) I’d say don’t overthink it, just like get SD and enjoy. Id you don’t like kde you can always get another distro on it.