Hopefully they get to Simple Launcher soon. I switched to that because Nova Launcher seemed to he dead and I couldn’t find a better open source alternative. I certainly will take suggestions if someone knows something better on fdroid.
If we judged citizens based on what their government does, I don’t think many of us would come out clean. As an American, I don’t want the whole world thinking that I agree with what the Feds are up to all the time. I recommend extending that same courtesy to people in countries who’s government you don’t like as well.
General trick for unknowns like this, you can rename a folder, open the applications. If they work, it is likely safe to delete that folder. If not, you rename that folder back. A simple way to test removing something non-destructively.
They may have done a poor job of explains thing, but they are right. Secure boot is a system that every manufactured computer in the last 5+ years has support. The only reason you can install anything but Windows on most PCs is because the manufacturer let you, but they could take it away in an instant by requiring secure boot and only allowing Microsoft’s signatures to boot an OS. Valve could have done the same thing if they chose. That’s basically how the XBox works these days, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the PlayStation is the same, since it is x64 as well.
Can’t say I’ve seen that yet, but it is a good point. Your home directory might still get a little messy. I think the thought of using the config to me a user per-desktop environment you test is problem a good idea.
I agree with NixOS as a good choice for this. The most important bit for me is it cleans up really well when you switch. Every other distro I’ve tried tends to leave a lot of mess behind and a lot of duplicate function apps.
Welcome to Gnome. “The defaults are good so you don’t need customization” seems to he their montra. Honestly there probably is a way to change the sidebar however you like, but it will he buried in a config file and break between upgrades. Dolphin might be a better fit. KDE seems to go the other way, not great defaults, but you can customize as you want.