The head appears to be sandwiched between two layers of metal.

Someone has bent the lid of the hdd, the other side you’re seeing is the reflection on the disc surface

The right hand side has a random piece that has shadows and depth that makes it look deeper than the disk depth on the left.

For me the shadows and reflections look consistently and reasonable. E.g. the reflection of the metal arc on the right hand side ought to appear thicker than the metal of the arc due to the perspective.

Also what is that foam cutout over the disk? I have never seen that on drives I have opened.

No idea what it’s for, but I’ve already seen that in an hdd I’ve opened.

Ps: the downvote is not from me

Debian uses tasksel for managing specific tasks like the desktop environment. So

sudo tasksel install desktop kde  
sudo tasksel remove desktop gnome

should switch the DE from GNOME to KDE.

Iirc, at least the text installer (I’m not a fan of graphical installers, thus I can’t tell about those) asks if and which DE it should install. You can choose between Gnome, KDE, XFCE, LXQt, and others.

As @solrize@lemmy.ml already mentioned: Download the python 3.10 source tarball from python.org, unpack, compile and install it. Then run the python3.10 binary with the venv option in the path where you want your venv to be created. By this, the created venv is configured to use the desired (3.10) version of python, not your system’s default version.