You can tinker for the most part, it’s just done differently. In the Universal Blue world, that would be creating your own OCI container using their image template or blue build.

The nice thing is that it makes the OS much more reproducible than imperative commands and scripts.

Not a security issue, copyright/license issues.

In my experience, many Gnome apps make doing complex tasks pretty easy compared to third party apps. However, it is at the cost of customization and questions like “why can’t I do this???”

But in general, Gnome’s simple design works for me, most things feel clean and polished. I don’t need the vast majority of features offered.

In the cases where Gnome’s default aren’t powerful enough, often times the KDE equivalent isn’t good enough for me either despite offering more features and customization.

As an example, Gnome Text Editor vs Kwrite and Kate. GTS has the basics I need like line numbers (Apple’s text editor does not have this…) and that fits 80% of my needs. But what about more advanced things? Well, no markdown support but I don’t think Kate has that either. What about coding? I’d rather use a dedicated IDE than Kate or GTS.

The bar is meant to be very minimal and not distracting.

It takes up space, sure, but it’s close to the minimal height while still having easily readable time up top

You can purchase used electric cars too.

No, it’s a limitation with swaybg so they created a tool that doesn’t have that limitation.