could you link to the issue

It's a tiling window manager, like i3 or bspwm.

You have to pick out all the software (terminal, filemanager, text editor, whatever else a DE provides idk, but also things like a panel or launcher) yourself. Easy choices for that are KDE software (Konsole, Dolphin, Kate, etc), waybar, and rofi-wayland.

It also doesn't have a settings application (unless you use the very WIP and pretty outdated hyprset), all the configuration is in a file.

Sway is probably meh because it's a manual tiler. I use sway-autotiling in laptop mode and don't bother with switching the layout in tablet mode.

But generally the question should be "How does a stacking window manager even work with touch?" The answer is "like shit". Instead of having your windows automatically placed on the screen, you have to drag them around with your stylus.

I used to use KDE Bismuth (tiler for Plasma) and it was the best experience on a touchscreen I could imagine. I mainly used 2 tiling layouts. The usual Master+Stack for regular use and when watching lectures I used a layout which is almost stacking but makes the windows slightly smaller than full screen, so you can grab the window on the bottom easily. I had a keybind which reduced the opacity of a window making it see-through. That way I could have my lecture over almost the full screen while still being able to write over almost the entire screen.

Plasma also has the option to do something when you drag from a specific screen edge. I used that to launch the app launcher, to select workspaces and lock the screen.

With gestures and and waybar it can work pretty good, its not easy to setup though

When distros make it the default DE, that's forcing it on them. No different then Microsoft bundling a specific browser. I also disagree that it works well on desktops. It lacks features, and tweaking it to resemble and behave like a more common desktop design is cumbersome.

off the top of my head,

1. Performance of gnome isn't great I often find it laggy on my lower end devices.

2. Configuring gnome requires two separate GUI apps, and then you still may need cli.

3. Gnome apps like nautilus, the file browser are also absurdly slow, sometimes taking more then 4 seconds for me (and others see here https://medium.com/@fulalas/gnome-mess-is-not-an-accident-4e301032670c) to load thumbnails.

4. I found gestures to be inconsistent on my Chuwi hi10x too. They often times wouldn't work and I would need to try multiple times.

I did have other issues, but I didn't exactly log them.

Gnome might be built for touch, but that doesn't make it a great experience. Also KDE automatically rotates for me too.