That’s strange - vanilla gnome should start in overview mode and dash is populated with gnome apps by default. Aside from that, there’s a button in the upper left corner that goes into overview if you press it.

Maybe your install did get corrupted, because literally my grandma could figure it out. On the other hand, most mainstream distros ship with dash to dock and discoverability must be the reason.

That's weird, and sucks you had that experience. I should take a step back and say that I haven't used a lot of different districts, including Debian. What I have experienced though, was either a star menu like button either in the bottom left, to left, or a floating dock.

I went full in on Arch when I made my permanent switch a couple of years back to make myself really learn more rather than just plug and play. That may be skewing my perspective some. However, I did throw mint on an old laptop that I have to my brother, and I was shocked that everything was exactly ready to go after install. Libre office, browser, other useful tools, updates, etc. I spent more time verifying things than configuring them and just passed it off.

I know that at least when I install kde in Arch, there are a few different build options from fully loaded to no extra apps. Perhaps with Debian there is a similar selection and you grabbed something stripped down rather than fully loaded? I'm not sure, but it's good to hear this stuff to check my ignorance when discussing this with people.