I’ve been wanting one of these but I’m waiting until my old phone gives up the ghost or becomes unusable.

Noctalia + Wayfire finally lured me away from XFCE.

I didn’t know people used map applications for this.

It’s easy to uninstall software you don’t want, but making it difficult to install those things would be tricky without making it difficult to install everything. I mean, you could remove the default repo, but then you wouldn’t be getting system updates. And you could still download and install unwanted types of packages from Github or somewhere like that, unless you got rid of your package manager altogether. Is the phone for a child or someone you don’t trust not to install random things?

KeePassXC can automatically keep a backup when it makes changes.