First, this would be a better question to ask in a Linux specific community.
Second, Build time is really subjective to the computer and its hardware. There could be bottlenecks at the cpu/memory from the motherboard that will slow it down. It also depends on whether you’re spinning rust or using an ssd.
There are a lot of factors involved in the whole that makes it hard to definitively say how long something takes to build.
I don’t know about gnome, but on KDE you can disable touch support under settings>mouse & touchpad.