I happened to vanilla installed Arch Linux + incomplete KDE and several eye candies.

Caveat to installing

• Remove secure boot
• rfkill unblock wifi
• Install btrfs, i.e. "better fs"
• Install NetworkManager. No, there won't be iwctl or NetworkManager, if you don't install it.
• User management and install sudo
• Install GRUB, but switch to refind later, with cp /etc/os-release /boot/etc/os-release
• Install yay. I know that Ubuntu / Debian do have apt search, but yay -Ss, yay -Qs searches the whole AUR and looks more powerful
• Install missing drivers
• Install not only plasma, but also kde-applications, just to uninstall many later. (Also installed sddm. Liked better than lightdm)

yay -Rc $(pacman -Qsq kde game) konsole dolphin konquerer kmail
yay -S terminator thunar chromium vscodium-bin vscodium-bin-marketplace

• Does anyone really use Konquerer / Epiphany, BTW?
• Editing Plasma desktop (KDE) to look like GNOME / Xfce.
• Edit SDDM with Arch theme
• Edit icons as deem fit, by editing ~/.local/share/application/**/*.desktop and finding the icons

find /usr/share/icons -iname '*.png'

• Change Mail application to

[Desktop Entry]
Comment[en_US]=
Comment=
Exec=xdg-open https://mail.zoho.com/zm/#compose
GenericName[en_US]=
GenericName=
Icon=internet-mail
MimeType=
Name[en_US]=Email in browser
Name=Email in browser
Path=
StartupNotify=true
Terminal=false
TerminalOptions=
Type=Application
X-DBUS-ServiceName=
X-DBUS-StartupType=
X-KDE-SubstituteUID=false
X-KDE-Username=

What about your desktop?

Doesn't have to be Arch. Might be i3wm or Openbox or something else. Care to share your customization?

(BTW, I don't know if I will survive if I tried non-systemd, like Artix.)