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I am not seeing a distinction between how I interpret what you are looking for and what Kodi appears to be trying to do.

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Kodi became it's own deeply complex thing; far from a WM/DE?

I suppose I mean something that Linux people would recognize is a DE. A slightly easier and TV-ish interface, but still ships with e.g. apt or pacman or whatnot, etc.

In addition to what lolinder pointed out about a WM being completely unrelated to your package manager choice, I want to reiterate the point made by TaylorAlexander - Kodi is a TV-ish interface that ships with an integrated repository of add-ons that can be installed. What you are describing in the sentences where you're not mentioning a DE is exactly what Kodi is.

Your WM/DE doesn't ship with apt or pacman or whatnot, because your WM/DE is just the window manager or desktop environment.

The underlying distribution will be Debian or Fedora or Arch or Alpine or whatever, which will provide package management and whatever else you need. Then you install something like Kodi on top of that as the WM/DE:

https://kodi.wiki/view/HOW-TO:Install_Kodi_for_Linux?https=1

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