Well I mean, there’s no reason why the user shouldn’t be able to control what’s installed as essential userland. It just needs to be managed entirely separately from the system and “normal” userland. It could be as simple as a flag on apt, dnf, etc.

This is the reason I really, really love Nix. I have been fighting this same battle for years and Nix finally fixed it.

I'd define it as "never have zero packages that provide a DE". This could be a global setting in the package manager which you would be able to set to `false` if so desired.

You can always build escape hatches for that kind of use case. Some more stringent separation between essential and installed components could have prevented Linus removing his DE.