What I really like about the Analogy Battle that just occurred in this thread is that it clearly demonstrates that an analogy is a means of simply conveying an idea, not a representative of some kind of "truth."
I think that this becomes a very hard position to hold based on one single point: Users can directly observe, witness and measure that amount of Freedom of Choice that was present, but has been incrementally removed over the last five years.
At that point, any argument that seeks to dispel the notion of a Freedom of Choice (Something we had more of and now have less of) becomes apologetic rather than pragmatic.
But what are those users of? They are not just using Linux. They are using whatever technologies came with their distribution of choice. Their choices will be limited by the components that were selected by somebody else, and how they were implemented.
The disappointment (as per the thread's title) comes with the realization that Linux can be implemented in many different ways, what we call a distribution, as opposed to Linux being a single thing that is fully modular on the fly.
You keep insisting that since Distro makers or hardware makers have a choice in the matter, that users must relegate themselves to accepting a lack of choice.
This is a logical fallacy on many fronts.
I can only repeat: When users (Of GnuLinux) directly observe modular functionality being taken away (Gnome), that freedom of choice we used to have, but no longer do, your argument justifying a lack of choice today fails to address the removals.
It fails to justify the absence of choices, today - that were present yesterday. It is an argument without a point.
You can still force remove (or add) a package without dependencies, just through the terminal. I recall my old Slackware days of manually adding and installing EVERY dependency for a package because it wouldn't do any dependency checks for you, it was strictly up to you. Similarly for uninstalling, it would only uninstall that 1 specific package, then if you wanted to clean up even more packages, you'd manually sift through them all, and check between other packages to make sure it was safe to remove said packages.
I am personally a fan of this automated way versus the former. However, if you asked me in the past, I would say I would want manual control. But there's SO MANY packages now, and so many versions and sub-versions, that it would be a nightmare to do now.
I was unaware that that's how shell packages work. I'll be honest, I don't look too hard into that section, so that's very annoying. But on the other hand, presumably if you're using it, you want to keep it in running order. I see both sides, and I raise another DE as the best alternative.
Well there are plenty of alternative distributions with xfce. By default Devuan's DE is xfce. If you want a different or additional ones, you can select them at point of install. PCLOS APT/rpm has xfce, as does PCLOS Debian, the latter I actually kind of like.
Distributions are opinionated by nature, and this usually implies fewer options available to the end user. I'm not suggesting that users should accept it, or that this even okay, but it seems to be the case a lot more often than not.
I decided to use Brave A.I. search with:
"How to uninstall a package on ubuntu without crippling other packages that rely on libraries used by package to be removed."
It came back with
"#
Uninstalling Ubuntu Packages Safely
To uninstall a package on Ubuntu without affecting other packages that rely on its libraries, you can use the apt-get remove command followed by apt-get autoremove to clean up any unused dependencies. First, run sudo apt-get remove PACKAGE_NAME to remove the specified package. Then, use sudo apt-get autoremove to remove any unused dependencies that were installed alongside the package.
Alternatively, you can use the --purge option to remove the package along with its configuration files, but be cautious as this might also remove configurations for other packages that depend on the same libraries. To avoid unintended removals, you can first list the packages that would be removed by running dpkg --get-selections | grep PACKAGE_NAME | awk '{ print $1 }' and then decide whether to proceed with the removal.
For a graphical interface, you can use the Synaptic Package Manager or the Ubuntu Software Center. Search for the package, mark it for removal, and apply the changes. This method allows you to review which packages will be removed and make adjustments if necessary.
If you installed the package from a PPA repository, you may also want to remove the PPA after uninstalling the package to prevent future updates from that repository."
So clearly there is no clean way to remove a package without removing dependencies other applications rely on as intimated by the latter part of the response.
