[onli]

Not parent, but...

There is a rich world of window managers, if you run a proper distro with X11. IceWM for example is a great building block for your own desktop, you can combine it with the file manager you prefer, or use a terminal instead for that, use it with a dock, tray and a helper like conky instead of the default task bar. The capabilities of real WMs are great, to pin windows (permanently), have workspaces, give overviews - and that's before going into the auto tiling direction.

But that's only if you want to have something custom. Otherwise KDE would be the default alternative to Gnome, then XFCE or LXQT for smaller desktop environments.