Why did they have to ruin Gnome?

Well there is quite a choice of others, PCLinuxOS mainstream has Plasma, MATE, and xfce. Community spins include Trinity (early KDE desktop):

A mainstream distro that uses Trinity, Q4OS:
https://www.q4os.org/

Other PCLinuxOS Community spins include Enlightenment DE and LXQt.

Or take a look at GhostBSD which uses MATE and is similar in style to Gnome2:

(Share your desktop, what does it look like? - #2753 by swarfendor437)

There is also Ubuntu Cinnamon:

1 Like