>>105734792 (OP)
There's no one way to do it, don't believe reddit faggots who say you need arch and hyprland or whatever the latest shiny thing is. On literally any distro you can install xfce, or really any DE that isn't GNOME or Cinnamon and you'll have a good amount of customization. If you want to get even fancier you can get a tiling WM like i3 but this requires manual installation of a few different packages and manual editing of config files.