PShaw, that’s how I had to do it. Slackware on floppy. Pre-internet search engine, one computer per household. No cellular data.
windows -> Dial up -> look at some docs, take nodes -> reboot into Slackware -> mess with the console -> get stuck -> reboot into windows -> repeat
I ran gnome for about a decade. I really didn’t like how a lot of bits and pieces of it worked so I went and found all of the plugins and religiously installed and updated them. Updates what happened, crab would break, I’d just have to deal.
At some point I tried KDE. And it literally did everything that I was doing to gnome through plugins out of the box.
I’m all about configurability but I’m also a pretty big fan of not having to fuck with it because it already does what I want out of the box.