@memoriesin8bit I didn't know 🤣
But after a laugh I think a distro should not change your default DE, it's a bad behaviour

@pikario The way I understand is that often it's through people installing ProtonVPN tray icon which is only needed for Gnome and has all of it as a dependency. This then also installs GDM which boots to Gnome by default.
What I don't understand, yet is how just installing a Display/Login Manager automatically activates it. Say I installed it, I would need to disable SDDM and enable GDM. But I suppose some more beginner friendly distros do this automatically by now?

@memoriesin8bit
This sounds like something that could have happened twenty years ago. But now? This behavior is anything but beginner friendly.
(Saying this as a GNOME enthousiast since v1.2 or thereabout)
@pikario

@reinouts @pikario Agreed. Installing a whole desktop cause you accidentally install a package made for that desktop - okay fine. The rest is not okay. As I said before, I don't even know how that works. Maybe Mint automatically activates services you just installed to make it easier for newcomers? I dunno.