To add another opinion. I love gnome 3, Its by far the nicest DE I have used on linux and what I would recommend to anyone to start with. I have used XFCE/Mate/Plasma/Unity and none of them worked as well. Its usually not even so much the design (although xfce does look very dated) but that they seem to have such little development resources that many parts of the DE are lagging software wise 5 to 10 years behind what they should.
XFCE is still in the process of upgrading to GTK3 when GTK4 is already out and they still have made no progress on migrating to wayland so its not a usable DE for a modern desktop experience.
Gnome just works and it just works very well. After using xcfe for a year I would go to report multiple bugs only to find they have already been reported years ago while on gnome I have only opened feature requests.
XFCE is still in the process of upgrading to GTK3 when GTK4 is already out and they still have made no progress on migrating to wayland so its not a usable DE for a modern desktop experience.
Gnome just works and it just works very well. After using xcfe for a year I would go to report multiple bugs only to find they have already been reported years ago while on gnome I have only opened feature requests.