Barney. Is its mascot a purple dinosaur that everyone over the age of five hates with a passion? Because that's the association the name calls up for me, and it makes me dislike the project just on general principles.

But what would prevent somebody plug in a USB with and just wipe my drive?

If they have enough access to plug in a USB key, they have enough to smash the drive (or the entire machine) with a sledgehammer. Or move it to another machine that they control and wipe and reimage it there.

(Shades of the xkcd with the crypto-nerd and the pipewrench: there's always a non-technical, or less-technical, solution when it comes to security.)

You can install any desktop environment on any distro. For some of the more obscure DEs on some distros, a bit of hoop-jumping may be required, but it's still possible. And some distros ship without any DE at all.

Technically, you can have a functional desktop without a DE at all, just a bare window manager (in X) or compositor (wayland), but that's getting into advanced topics.

It's a normal browser setting left over from the early days of the Internet, when most pages did little or no theming (or did it badly). My primary browser is Pale Moon, which exposes the setting as a dropdown under Preferences > Content > General > Colors. Firefox also exposed the setting on its settings page the last time I checked, although it may be a checkbox there. It's also a boolean in about:config, browser.display.use_document_colors.

Chrome-family browsers may not have such a setting, unfortunately. The only one I keep handy is Vivaldi, which doesn't have it but does have a "Force a dark theme on all websites" checkbox (under Settings > Appearance > Website Appearance).

I chose a slightly different way of achieving what that extension does, and long ago set my browser not to allow websites to choose their own colours. That does partially break a few sites that don't handle their images properly, but overall it's workable and gives me white on a slightly different dark colour for each browser profile.

The colour scheme. White screens are one of the things that trigger my migraines.

This in turn leads to my modifying several other visual aspects of the desktop, because a lot of widget set themes come with scrollbars that don't work well with really dark colours. I also turn animations and automagic snapping and desktop navigation facilities off, because I find them annoying. Kindly behave like it's 1999 and don't do anything I don't explicitly tell you to do, Mr. Desktop.

And then I embed a conky instance in the second desktop for general monitoring—CPU activity (composite and by thread), memory in use, disk space, network usage, temperatures, fan levels, and greediest processes all conveniently in a single view that doesn't require me figuring out what I did with the window.

KDE provides a very large set of services. This makes it something of an elephant in the world of Linux desktop environments. Lighter DEs should fit in less than 1GB (that's anything other than KDE and Gnome). I think the last time I checked my system with just the DE up and nothing open, it was using on the order of 200-300MB. However, the lighter DEs will also do less by default.

It should be safe to kill baloo, but as others have already said, you will see some tradeoffs in how file searching works if you stick with KDE. If I'm not mistaken, it may restart periodically to index new files unless you go to some effort to exorcise it.

Perhaps if you're younger than the horse, it owns you instead.

That may have been the point.

I'd be more impressed if they stopped bundling random crap. It's their unwillingness to use upstream's dependencies and toolchains that makes Chromium a nightmare to package on Gentoo, and flatpaks are not going to fix that. They bundle clang, rust, and so many additional libraries that the "must keep bundled version to prevent breakage" list is almost 300 items long. This is not the correct way to ensure reproducibility, guys.

I'd be interested in tests across hardware of different ages (but as others have said, same/similar DEs/WMs/compositors as much as possible, please). While I have no proof, I'd guess that Wayland is making assumptions that would make it less efficient on some older kit.

Exactly. I mean, I like OpenSCAD, but there are things that are effectively impossible to do in it that are easy with a more visual piece of modelling software. Good for utility parts that need precise tolerances, not so good for dragon statues.