I don’t use GNOME, but from what I’ve read (and from experience with other software that has extensions) they often break when GNOME updates.

but had the genes

I’d say that falls under “birth lottery” as much as wealth inheritance.

on my gaming PC, it never used the GPU.

In my experience, that is usually a problem with the GPU OpenCL drivers. Sadly, the Mesa OpenCL implementation didn’t include image support when I last checked (you can check with clinfo | grep "Image support"). For AMD cards you need to have either the “pro” driver or ROCM installed, both aren’t packaged by all distros. Similar with Intel, don’t know about Nvidia, but I’m sure if it works, it’s only with the proprietary driver.

I ended up installing darktable in an arch distrobox container, as arch has ROCM packages (in AUR) and ever since GPU acceleration is working fine.

This is mostly what I use too. Additionally, on images with high ISO I usually add the profiled denoise module, often without changing the default values. If the image has a lot of noise, I sometimes use the preset that only reduces chroma noise (so the image stays grainy, but without the color mismatches)