And I think all programs should follow user theming, regardless of desktop environment, widget set, or anything else. ('Scuse me while I give GTK4 the stinkeye again.) You can never tell whether someone’s colour selection is a matter of accessibility rather than just personal preference, so you absolutely should not ignore it. Defaults matter very little as long as you can change them.

It’s really more nvidia’s fault than Mint’s—the nvidia proprietary drivers periodically drop support for a generation or three of cards, and nouveau doesn’t work properly with some cards because nvidia has a history of not giving out needed information.

Why would it be awkward? Most non-technical people are so thrown by my white-text-on-black desktop theme that they can’t even tell what software I’m using, and the few technical people around know that I have Opinions about software and aren’t interested in talking about it. Keeping everything adequately compatible with the company-issued software is my problem.

How would I blacklist the nouveau driver?

Create a file in /etc/modprobe.d/ containing the text blacklist nouveau (worked for me on Gentoo and for a friend on Ubuntu) or add a kernel parameter module_blacklist=nouveau to your bootloader. However, if you don’t have the correct proprietary driver, that won’t help.

After 20 years of Gentoo, I don’t see myself switching in the next five. Comfortable, capable, flexible.

I switched from KDE 3.5 (whenever that was current).

Terrifyingly, I think someone is still maintaining KDE 3.5 proper for OpenSUSE. Then there’s TDE, which is widely available. (But you probably mean 15-20 years ago.)