Github is awash with people's dotfiles including fully featured DEs built on top of things like Hyprland and Noctalia, and they don't require you to use a mess of a distro to use them.
100% this, either use a DE like GNOME or Cosmic if you can't be bothered, or spend a little time looking at someone's dotfiles.
No need to use a whole distribution with 1000 other poor decisions made for you.
Yeah, I mean when I set up my last distro I just installed claude and told it what I wanted and in about 30 minutes it was up and running. No need to install random distros!