Agreed with your closing thoughts. It’s never been more obvious that we can’t rely on commercial entities.
The fruits of years of organic growth within subs squandered in the name of corporate profits should be the wake-up call the average person needs.
Often when things like this happen (see:dig, twitter) the question gets asked “what can be done?” Well, let me tell you about FOSS…
Awesome! Glad it worked out
No you can always recover, uninstall it and reinstall later if you need it.
Looks like you could just
mv /usr/share/xdg-desktop-portal/portals/gnome.portal /home/<your-profile> and remove the associated env variable. This way you don’t mess with your packages. I’d start with the wiki linked in this thread.
I mean a core issue is that it doesn’t adhere to the unix principle of do one thing and do it well. Aside from that it essentially creates a middle layer where things can happen without you really knowing it’s happening. If you haven’t I’d suggest running a couple of different init systems to see what I mean.
I’m ambivalent, I like systemd because it’s convenient, but I also like openrc because it’s simple.
Gentoo and Debian. Debian will let you get back to what you really want to be doing whereas gentoo gives you excellent granularity over everything, but can be overwhelming and time consuming.
Really should ask yourself what you’ll be mostly doing and pick a tool (distro) that let’s you accomplish that.