I’d say Ubuntu Desktop kinda bloated also, I personally run either Void Linux or OpenBSD but there is some tinkering there. On OpenBSD I run cwm as a window manager which can be customized to look pretty cool. Both Void Linux and OpenBSD can run GNOME. I used dwm and spectrwm also for a while. I had some problems with packages on Void Linux, not impossible to solve but if I you’d like more packages probably I’d go with Arch but there’s some tinkering there also. For less tinkering, I’d probably go with Manjaro.