I remember one time I installed a lot of themes for my session and I broke something and the themes changed my icon files forever and I had to reinstall Ubuntu!!
Should I just stick to changing my wallpaper and other small tweaks? I don’t really like using vanilla Ubuntu anymore, it doesn’t feel like me. Thank you very much!!
In short, it’s difficult. You have to be careful to only use themes that are are tested to work with your version of GNOME. That’s why while using GNOME, I’d stick with whatever stock theme variants come preinstalled. At least you get a few accent colors on Ubuntu. You can always change your wallpaper. 🥹
As long as you do not use root privileges (indicated by sudo or that password promt pkexec) you cannot destroy the system in a way that can’t be fixed by deleting a few files in the users home directory.
Have backups. Use something like Veeam Endpoint or a similar software that will image the entire system in a bootable state, and schedule it daily with incremental storage.
Every day stuff could potentially break something, updates out of your control could break something, hardware failures happen, etc…
Use something other than gnome and, while you’re at it, you might as well use something other than ubuntu.
KDE is very hard to break, you can go wild with customization there.
I’ve been using gnome for the past year on my laptop and on my desktop I’ve been using kde. I haven’t used my desktop in a few months and I missed kde. I moved from silverblue to fedora kinoite on my laptop and I don’t think that it’s been two weeks but today I went back to gnome because the overview is much more polished than kde’s. It just works. Gnome always breaks extensions when they update a major version but I’ve seen so many “extensions” on kde now which are all not updated anymore and break stuff that I might actually think that gnome’s way is kind of good. Maybe it was just the fedora version which lead to so many bugs but the experience I had in the past week wasn’t so good.
