Don’t get scared. Even when you f*ck up the most you can just wipe out the theme related files from your home folder and start from scratch. GNOME is probably the least customizable, among DEs KDE, XFCE, LXDE, MATE, they all work well, or you could also try tiling wms or classic wms like fvwm…

Slackware is still awesome. I’m typing this from my Slackware 15 machine. Rock solid distro.

Devuan or Debian is great.

Though I’m curious how does teletry work in a GNU/Linux system? Is there some daemon like ‘telemetryd’ that watches /var/log or something…?

I usually use WindowMaker or FVWM but as a desktop environment… CDE

Slackware

• the most rock stable distro imo. No systemd or snap stuff. Packages are almost (if not fully) vanilla version from upstream. Simple yet efficient unix-style approach to everything like package management, slackbuilds are really good too.