There must be something about GNOME in particular that some people love, and others hate.
GNOME is heavily opinionated.
As such it gets praise from people that share that opinion and gets hate from the people that do not. Many other DEs are much more configurable, giving a broader audience the possibility to adjust everything to their liking.
That’s incorrect.
The Framework Desktop features soldered RAM to achieve the DDR5-8000 speeds. The Framework 13 caps out at DDR5-5600 but has regular DIMM slots.
(grateful for flatpaks for once!)
That’s how I run my system right now. Fedora KDE + pretty much everything as Flatpak.
Gives me a recent enough kernel and KDE version so I don’t have to worry when I get new hardware or new features drop but also restricts major updates to new Fedora versions so I can hold those back for a few weeks.
I made a similar switch as you but from Ubuntu to Fedora because of outdated firmware and kernel.
You can install repacks pretty seamlessly in Bottles.
https://flathub.org/apps/com.usebottles.bottles
Create a gaming prefix, move all installers into the prefix and hit “Run executable” one by one for each installer.
Although if you can afford it, Baldur’s Gate 3 devs deserve the money. Great game and available DRM free on GOG and Steam.
Maybe an e-book reader like KOReader? https://flathub.org/apps/rocks.koreader.KOReader
Plenty of them support local HTML.