I think ‘better connected’ refers more to feature integration rather than looks. Stuff like KDE Connect.

It’s a fancy clock style, the position of the dots acts like clock arms.

You can set the clock style to “empty” and put any other clock widget you like on top instead (I use Geometric Weather). It’s unfortunate that it’s so easy to miss.

Are you sure? I thought that what you describe is what packages suck as NikGapps did, while MicroG is a reimplementation of the code. It does call Google webservers, but it doesn’t run Google’s blobs (which is also why it’s severely limited/fragile compared to packages that run them)

https://github.com/microg/GmsCore/wiki