I suppose COSMIC technically never migrated/transitioned from X11 to Wayland, because it’s been Wayland-only from inception.

AFAIK Cinnamon is on track to be the first smaller DE with full wayland support.

I think Budgie just beat them to it. To be clear, Budgie 10.10 is literally Wayland-only.

Are you on systemd or sysVinit? If you’re on the latter, could you tell if you’ve even noticed any difference so far? Thanks in advance!

I definitely agree with you on GNOME being rather opinionated. Perhaps more so than most other DEs.

Anyhow, thanks again for appreciating my input and compliments!

Great write-up! Thank you for the effort!

Though, if I may: Regarding GNOME, you said:

Not particularly customisable

I would rather rephrase this to “Does not expose many knobs for customization by default.”. Because -frankly- between dconf, extensions and CSS; the possibilities are actually quite expansive. So much so, even, that a KDE dev said regarding GNOME: “sometimes it (read: GNOME) can be customized better than KDE”. (They say this literally in the first 10 seconds or so.)

Another striking example of the breadth of GNOME’s customization would be how Niri was heavily inspired by GNOME’s PaperWM extension. (Source) So, GNOME’s customizability has allowed the creation of a new workflow that eventually served as a direct inspiration for one of the most exciting WMs we’ve got.

Do you mean Desktop Environments?

EDIT: OP has changed the title of the post since. Regardless, thank you OP for the confirmation/clarification! FWIW, I really like Eylenburg’s resource on this.