> It's more packages I need to download. Doubly annoying because 95% of the packages are just "thin wrapper around foo, because we're too hipster to use libraries directly like peasants".
"Number of packages" is not a very meaningful metric. The combined filesize isn't that large (not by the standards of an image editor anyway), and under any modern package manager installing a package with dependencies is no harder than installing one without.
> It installs system-wide services I have to disable/mask just so other programs don't mistakenly use them because they think I run KDE and they have to integrate into it.
Really? KDE tends to be a well-behaved crossplatform citizen IME (unlike Gnome) and not rely on anything system-wide. (There was some horribly ill-advised semantic nonsense in KDE 4, but I don't think it ever affected Krita).