AUR is the place for unverified submissions. The verified stuff typically ends up in the main repos.

The preinstalled apps are not a feature of KDE (or Gnome, XFCE, etc.). Actually they all are structured in a very modular way where you can use or omit individual components. Firefox and LibreOffice are completely independent of it even; they merely add compatibility layers to make the integration more seamless.

What you experienced was something to attribute to the distribution you chose. They are the ones to decide which components to bundle and preinstall. That is also the reason why so many distributions exist in the first place, because different teams/devs have different visions about what the desktop should look and feel like after install.

I think it’s not that easy. From what I understand, the payment providers enforce that for the whole store, otherwise they don’t want to be involved. Quite shitty, but they have enough weight to pull shit like that off.

I think you won’t regret it. If the container startup installs stuff, you might lock yourself out when the remote server has issues, your network has issues, or if the package you install changes due to an update.

With it baked into an image, you have reproducible results. If you build a new image and it doesn’t work anymore, you can immediately switch back to the old one and figure out the issue without pressure.

The idiomatic way would be to build your own image. That’s exactly the strength of the layering of container images.

“No sex!!!” … “You don’t even give us grand kids 😭😭”

The thread is about snap and why it’s worse than flatpak.

Wanna meet? /s