I really couldn’t bring myself to use Ubuntu — or any *buntu derivative.

Quite apart from Canonical’s past (and present?) dodgy practices, it’s bloatware. If you want a full distro (i.e. not designed to run entirely in 1K of RAM and use no space on your HDD) that’s still light on resources then my advice is to use Arch: the only things installed on your system are the things you expressly installed yourself, not a load of stuff the distro installed for you, just in case you might like to use it one day … the only services running are the ones you installed, enabled and started yourself … the only open ports are the ones you opened. Don’t need Samba? It’s not even installed, never mind running in the background ‘just in case it might be useful to you.’ Not planning on printing anything? You don’t ever even need to hear of CUPS, let alone track it down, stop it and disable it.

Equally, Gnome is bloated AF — the only thing bulkier is KDE. If you want lightweight but still powerful enough to provide most of the features you’ll need, I recommend XFCE — and it’s actually more configurable then Gnome!

To each their own though, so have fun with it — whichever distro one chooses, as long as it is still maintained, it will be a vast improvement over the hot mess that is Win10.