trisquel-recommended

Why am I unable to remove some apps/programs without breaking other things?

What did you try removing and how?

Is this because of a package called trisquel-recommended?

In my understanding, if you uninstall something part of a metapackage that is installed, it will work and the metapackage will just be uninstalled. That said, I guess that a possible drawback of removing a trisquel metapackage is that, if it becomes later necessary for some update to install a new package and to do this it is included in a trisquel metapackage that you have uninstalled, it won't be added automatically.

There are some default apps I will never use and would prefer to remove them. Is there a way around this issue?

There are probably plenty of apps or utilities I don't use but I think they cause no harm and by removing things I may actually create problems for myself, so I just ignore them. To avoid seeing them in the menus, I just unticked them in mozo menu.

You should read this explanation of how 'trisquel-recommended' works: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/uninstalling-gnome-keyring#comment-153342