You can launch single applications with X forwarding, and X can launch applications without a desktop.
Depending on needs, a web interface may be better. Like Cockpit or something more application-specific.

Linus stepped away from the spotlight and apologized and went to therapy and changed his behavior

The Famicom had a modem with online shopping and horse race gambling. It also had a floppy disk module with a ram adapter that also added an extra audio channel. Zelda 1 and 2 debuted on this. It also had 3D goggles, the predecessor to the Virtual Boy. It also had an entire keyboard that plugged in, and a cartridge packed with sprites, tiles, sound effects, and example code you could hack up and save to another add-on: a cassette tape recorder that saved your game projects encoded in audio.
The Super Famicom had a radio receiver that clicked onto the bottom that downloaded new games from space.
The Game Boy had an entire cartridge pin for audio passthrough so future tech built into cartridges could preprocess sound and send it straight to output.
The N64 also had a floppy-disk loading module.
The GameCube had a module that plays DMG, GBC, and GBA games (but more importantly turns the GameCube into an actual cube).

Firefox now has instructions on their “Debian-based” install section about pinning their repo over Canonical’s so that doesn’t happen.

Because you’re right, Canonical does think so highly of their product that they will constantly attempt to undermine other options against your will.