Super important. I do also choose a DE first and look for a distro that supports it out of the box second.
This being said, while I think Gnome looks amazing, it’s whole UX is killing me. I tried it over and over again, because it looks so beautyful. But it always starts to frustrate and annoy me.
I was ling term Cinnamon user and recently switched to KDE Plasma. Luckily, as Linux users we have a choice.
I had issues with Solaar detecting my devices when plugging the dongle in a USB hub in the past, even when the connected devices worked. Maybe you can try to connect the dongle to another port, in best case directly on the Notebook or PC mainboard, just to make sure that this is not the issue.
This being said, it works for me on even with a USB hub on a freshly installed Fedora on a new PC.