the issue is that things like the DHT and PeX can leak your own home ip address, and local peer discovery can leak the torrents you’re seeding to local network devices.

Mullvad is very privacy oriented, hence it giving this advice.

on my normal desktop I use the flavor of the day DE, gnome is only used on my 40 inch touchscreen, because its the only one I could imagine being good on a touchscreen

Send them a message? They are usually very helpful, you might be able to either get a model or a replacement part.