A question with no right answer, because it is a matter of taste and habits.
Both are very much sophisticated desktop environments which very useful defaults. Neither Gnome nor Plasma are too complicated for beginners and can be customized easily. If you want to you can go very deep into the customization too.
What I find kind of strange is that they have used Gmail before. Feels not to be the best decision for a VPN service which offers anonymous access.
Even better that they have switched now.
A combination of different.
For brainstorming Logseq is great, for tasks I use CalDAV in combination with Thunderbird and JTX Board (Android) a lot.
What if you are using VIM and Arch ...
That after getting used to Linux I will hate to be forced to use less free operating systems.
Tried it and was not much pleased. What makes it better in your opinion?
When I am on Hyprland I use foot. It is fast and well configurable.
My fallback is Gnome and inside I use the new kgx aka Console. I like that it shows in the window decoration's color when I'm working remotely or as super user.
Yeah, foot is really fast even without server mode.
The first comment on the source code is very useful and productive.
Using NixOS as my daily OS on a X1 since six years now.
The first months have been hard as at this time was no installer at all and I had to do everything manually. After a while I got used to the update process.
Recently I switched to Nix Flakes which is another challenge but seems to make the Nix way even more consequent.
The only odd thing what drives me nerves is that compiling on that machine takes sometimes a half day.
Besides this it is still the best OS I ever used
You seem to be aware of many things.
Just for communication you are using more unfree tools then free and more then in the other categories.