There's nothing wrong with a DE, those are great for the people who want an experience that "just works". But I switched to Linux because I was tired of someone else deciding to install hundreds of packages I'll never use, and start up dozens or hundreds of services in the background that I never asked for.

Part of the feeling of owning my machine has been looking at the list of packages installed, and the list of processes/services running and knowing why each one is there.