Reading back your installation description, I see you’re under Ubuntu, probably with a GNOME-derived desktop (considering your mention of Geany). The Unix design philosophy, inherited by Linux, is small utilities combined to provide a service. This is the opposite of monolithic “universal” applications. Such application are difficult to implement, to maintain and to modify. This is why you have so many different apps: file managers, text editors, web browsers, office suites, CAD programs, DTP apps, …
However developers have recognised that users have a preferential domain. And they created “environments” which overlay the common apps to offer a unified vision of your data.
I am not familiar with GNOME because I prefer KDE. Perhaps, you have an equivalent feature. In KDE you can define Activities where your file system (essentially your home directory, but this is not limitative) is virtually restructured to show only the files of interest. This restructuration does not apply only on files. It is also effective on the desktop: the application menu only shows the apps you’ve chosen, the desktop itself is customised.
The goal is both to protect yourself against your own errors and to be more efficient in your present job. You can of course switch between your activities (with the activities menu) and this changes your desktop environment.
This a lightweight substitute to using different sessions (user-ids) with the added benefit of easily sharing data between activities. It is possible to switch between OS-sessions with Ctrl+Shift+Fn but this is heavier than selecting another activity (however you benefit from a superior separation, protecting more against error). And I you like a sledgehammer for watch making, you can go even further by creating a virtual machine for each of your activities. This offers maximum security but at what price?
I am no developer. I have no influence on the future of LO. Considering the pending bugs, some of them being very important, and the scarcity of developers, I personally (I insist this is really a personal statement) prefer developers focus on bugs rather than a feature which can be replaced but some other procedure outside LO, even if this feature is presently a mess. Of course, if the feature evolves, I’ll evaluate it and see if I can make some use of it.
