You aren't forced, but you are going against the grain of the OS if you start doing things that were not intended by the distribution maintainers. I used Ubuntu

You aren't forced, but you are going against the grain of the OS if you start doing things that were not intended by the distribution maintainers. I used Ubuntu for a decade - I'm familiar with it. Every tweak ended up in a more and more unpredictable and unmaintainable system that I had to just dump and reinstall every once in a while.