personally I’m moving to self hosting but that’s not viable for everyone. There doesn’t seem to be any direct replacement, other than wikitide but I wouldn’t trust that due to a few factors (ToS and Privacy policy ‘coming soon’ sounds legally dubious)

there’s been a severe lack of volunteers for a while, there’s only 4 people left on the team after the recent fallout.

i switched to linux so that i could customise everything, so ubuntu and manjaro (the first two i used) didn’t really do anything for me. After using a macbook for a bit (still my primary laptop), I found Arch which i now daily drive and love it!

idk about gnome but this sounds like you should look into tiling window managers