Definitely Gnome here. Though I have a long list of notes, it mostly just works exactly like I expect with little friction or guessing. I donate $100/year to both Gnome and KDE since they are both good pieces of software, and I love that I get to chose mine. Further, I think KDE is the logical choice for something like the SteamDeck where it’s going to have a lot of gamers that expect computers to work like Windows. (even if I don’t like it, >_<)
Ooh, not a “hot take” answer. I rather like MusikCube. It plays nice with putting my music on my NAS and running it from both my personal machines and my Windows/work machine too. I’m not specifically excited by it as a TUI, but it also works just fine as a basic-'03-iTunes-style-navigation clone. It’s super boring in the most usable of ways.
My more “hot take” answer is that I replace the terminal program in Fedora with the boring arsed “Gnome Console” from vanilla Gnome. It does all the stuff I want it to do and nothing more. If I was slightly more different than me I might be upset that it doesn’t do enough terminal things but I’m just me. :)
My 2c from buying Linux laptops. I had an 11th gen System 76 Lemur Pro that was pretty great. (20 - 30 hour battery life, no joke…) Well… until it started failing. I had to send it it multiple times to be repaired under warranty. Their service and support was the worst I’ve ever experienced, and the final time it took 6 weeks to get it fixed. Then it promptly died again just out of warranty. :( I replaced it with an AMD Framework as a very early adopter in batch 1. It’s been great so far other than a couple Mesa related bugs that came up, but nothing so bad as to make me regret it. It’s not as polished as an Apple product, but has a similar price. That’s maybe the worst thing I can say about it.