Unfortunately, Know Your Customer has done a lot of damage to privacy, but there’s still a lot of exchanges where you can get Monroe with Bitcoin without Know Your Customer. And since Monroe is actually truly anonymous, you have a truly anonymous currency at that point.
And the Monroe developers are working on making atomic exchanges work better, which are peer-to-peer trading of coins with low overhead and fees because it’s direct. No middleman.
I started with gnome and a handful of plugins to make it more like how I was used to, but over the years I pretty much just use stock, because once I got used to it it is just good by itself. Except for GTile. I still like to install GTile.