Homescreen and backgrounds

Greetings - I am brand new to /e/OS, having just set up a new Fairphone 6. Please bear with me if I am just being dense. So far, everything seems to work nicely. The Murena workspace log-in seems a little dodgy, but I think that is a more general problem, from what I’ve read, and in any case not a great worry for me at this time.

It may be petty but what I do not like, so far, and this is strictly ‘look and feel’ not getting in the way of functionality, is the ‘home screen’ . I’d like to:

  1. Get rid of the ‘suggestions’ on the home screen - they are seldom useful so far and I don’t want a changing set of ui elements, that’s just bad.- what I want is a small, stable set of apps that I choose to be on that screen. I’ve removed the default widgets.

  2. Un-blur the background. I get to set an image for the background but then can’t see it. Incidentally, the provided backgrounds are garish, loud and generally hideous - can we just have a solid color? I can’t find a way to do that yet.

thanks for any pointers, I’ll poke around some more and hope to find the right settings.

EDIT: Fossify Launcher - that’s what I was after.
cheers,
-Dord