I've found that Gnome works about as well as other "lighter" desktop environments on some hardware I have that is about 15 years old. I don't think it using a JS engine really impacts performance as much as people claim. Memory usage might be a bit higher, but the main memory hog on a machine these days is your web browser.

I have plenty of complaints about gnome (not being able to set a solid colour as a background colour is really dumb IMO), but it seems to work quite well IME.

> Or you can ignore all that nonsense and run openbox and native tools.

I remember mucking about with OpenBox and similar WMs back in the early 2000s and I wouldn't want to go back to using them. I find Gnome tends to expose me to less nonsense.

There is nothing specifically wrong with Wayland either. I am running it on Debian 13 and I am running a triple monitor setup without. Display scaling works properly on Wayland (it doesn't on X11).