Gnome
The GNOME Project is a free and open source desktop and computing platform for open platforms like Linux that strives to be an easy and elegant way to use your computer. GNOME software is developed openly and ethically by both individual contributors and corporate partners, and is distributed under the GNU General Public License.
The animations and performance are already very smooth. In fact I feel the performance is better than what you get with windows and the animations are smoother as well
Hmm. Maybe gnome is not correctly using hardware acceleration in your machine¿? In my experience, gnome is perhaps the smoothest DE though it is heavier in resource usage than XFCE, MATE, etc. It does stutter and drop frames when the system is seeing very heavy resource usage.
Edit : when I am using the powersaver settings given by power-profiles-daemon, gnome does stutter a little. This corresponds to amd-pstate being active with the scaling governor set to powersave and the energy vs performance hint set to save power.
I have a really not powerful Surface Go 1 with 8gb of RAM and Gnome isn’t laggy on it.
I guess your computer has a problem..
Well then I guess it has to be some weird driver issue or something related scaling or whatever.
I also have Gnome installed on my girlfriend MacBook Pro from 2012 (upgraded to 16gb of ram) and everything is fluid.
Or maybe I’m not seeing such small details and you have the curse of seeing them.
The software centre works on Fedora, but is completely broken on Ubuntu.
It was broken almost everywhere a while ago in the way you are describing, it's now pretty solid, but Canonical seriously screwed it up on 24.04 by breaking its dependencies so almost nothing works. Wouldn't be surprised if it's broken on Debian too, especially since that's likely an ancient version by now.