Well, you could if the package was set up differently, or if you wanted to go at it manually. But they way the maintainers set the dependencies makes apt think it has to remove the whole DE, or at least a bunch of essential parts of it.
I’m well over 25 years of sailing now (40 if you count games for early PCs), and they’ll pry the sabre out of my cold, dead hands. I’ve made not watching ads a lifestyle and piracy is so much easier than dealing with the bullshit interfaces of streaming companies.
If I have a way of directly donating to creators and not via their shitty production companies, I’ll take it. Podcasts have it right, I can send money to creators and get an ad-free stream. If I can’t, I don’t donate and I don’t listen to their work.
In the end, me avoiding ads isn’t costing anyone anything, because if I hear an ad, I likely avoid that product going forward. They have at best zero effect on my buying decisions, if not a negative one.
Possibly, but I encounter very, very few ads. So I might take a chance heard product and research it into a purchase, but I’m not going to do the “seven exposures and they’re sure to buy” sort of thing.
I’m from the era of untangling hacky init scripts from every flavour of Linux to get something to work or add something new. Systemd was like coming up for air.
I donate about what I figure I’d spend on proprietary products in a year, about $600-800. Mostly KDE and docker containers I use like piped, mailcow, nextcloud, as well as podcasts I listen to as long as they supply an ad-free feed.
I have 3 clones of my 10yo Manjaro desktop install running on other hardware around my network, including a Proxmox VM. It just jumps across, fires up and I fix the hostname, good to go.
The last paragraph comes across as about “no true Scotsman” as it gets. Maybe true IRL communism is as much fiction as the star trek depiction of it is.