If I was a newbie shopping around for a DE, I would probably be perusing websites like kde.org to get a feel for the visual style and features and such
Nefyedardu
Do you just look for things to get mad at? This hasn't even been implemented yet. Even if it had, it would be opt-in. And even if you opt-in, the data is all anonymous and you would be able to see exactly the data that gets sent out. If Fedora or anyone else really wanted to spy on you, I assure you they wouldn't let you know beforehand.
They don't need to be packaged at the time of creation anyway, they can be packaged right now. Distrobox makes this easy, like let's say you need an application that only works on Ubuntu 18.04. It's two commands:
distrobox create --image ubuntu:18.04 ubuntu
distrobox enter ubuntu -- sudo apt-get install _package_
Then to export the package to your desktop you can even do
distrobox enter ubuntu -- distrobox export --app _application_
Boom, you have an Ubuntu 18.04 application on an OS of your choosing. You can theoretically do this with any distro, distrobox can use any OCI images from docker-hub, quay.io, or any registry of your choice.
If it isn’t a Microsoft sanctioned solution, then multiple third party solutions exists that fix it.
That's not how this works. If it's not a Microsoft-sancioned solution, it literally cannot be fixed no matter how much effort you put in. You need an API to work with Windows. If Microsoft does not provide you with an API, you can't do it. And even if you find a way to hack together something, you have zero guarantee an update won't just come along and fuck it. Linux distros are open source, you can change quite literally any thing about them. That is what that person was talking about.
it actually is, you just append the distrobox command before it
distrobox enter arch -- yay -Sy appname