It can share TDE’s popcorn.

If you’re interested in doing the tech equivalent of a party trick (except that it’s less interesting to watch), go ahead and try. You’ll probably just end up reinstalling almost every package on the system that differs between the base distro and the offshoot. Harmless, but also pointless, since you could just have installed Debian from the get-go and saved yourself a lot of trouble.

There are a whole bunch of Very Silly Things you can do in the Linux world that aren’t worth the effort unless your income relies on the creation of niche Youtube vids. For instance, it should theoretically be possible to convert a system from Debian to Gentoo without wiping and reinstalling. I’m not going to try it.

My primary icon theme and widget style are 20+ years old and not flat in the least. You can still have that look and feel on a real computer if you want it (but you may have to compromise elsewhere or do some extra work). On phones, all bets are off.

Dunno what your issue with that icon pack is, but I’d bet there’s a good chance it can be solved with a few file renames or symlinks if you care enough to bother.

Most people are not obsessed monomaniacs with room for only one interest in their lives. That means that most Linux users are interested in things other than free software, so many will choose to “dress up” their computers in ways that showcase their other interests, and may use material that is not under copyleft licenses to do so. If this causes you anxiety or confusion, you may want to speak to a mental health professional. Seriously.

I ended up setting up custom themes for multiple different widget sets to get a true black background. It was easy for most QT variants, not too bad for GTK2, really awful for GTK3 because it doesn’t have proper documentation for manual theme creation, and I haven’t tried to tackle GTK4 yet.

Because they all need different configs (and the window manager title bar etc. may need yet another one), it’s difficult to give suggestions unless you tell us which terminal and window manager software you’re trying to theme—the requirements for a Gnome session are different from those for something like fluxbox. Some terminal software even has its own built-in theming support.

Yet another, “well, yeah, technically it has security ramifications, but I’m not admin’ing any multiuser machines, so I’m not losing any sleep over it” bug.

There’s an old joke from a couple of decades ago about what operating systems would be like if they were airlines:

Linux Airlines

Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself. When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, “You had to do what with the seat?”

Gentoo is still very much a “You had to do what with the seat?” distro, while most others have retired that concept to varying degrees, at the cost of the seats being less easy to perform unusual adjustments on.