While I agree with you personally, I also get why people do it. For some the tinkering with the DE is working, or at least having fun. It might be a form of procrastination or a genuine interest. It's not terribly different than reading productivity blogs or looking at other people's vacation photos.

> time that should be spent working is spent on tinkering with the DE

The counterargument is that time spent optimizing your workflow by tinkering with the DE pays off 10x.

Well the idea is supposedly that if you get your DE/WM just the way you want it, you can be more productive.

Various people have a love for tiling WMs because they can navigate and organize things with the keyboard.

> get your DE/WM just the way you want it, you can be more productive

Does that ever actually occur? My vimrc changes almost on a daily basis, and I'm frequently changing plugins, writing new tools, and creating new aliases all time time. And that's just for my terminal.

Having to repeat some of those modifications 3-4 times because I'm using a slightly different terminal app for each individual task would, I think, drive me batty.

> Does that ever actually occur? My vimrc changes almost on a daily basis, and I'm frequently changing plugins, writing new tools, and creating new aliases all time time. And that's just for my terminal.

Don't take it the wrong way, but that sounds like a personal problem ;-)

If I were changing my configuration files that often, I would start looking for an environment that worked better for me.

My config editing is approximately logarithmic. There's a bunch when I start using new software (or start using old software in a new environment), but it slows down quickly as time goes by. Nowadays, I might make a big change to my .emacs once a year, and maybe tweak a variable or keyboard shortcut once every 3 months or so, but generally it doesn't change much. Same with all my other config files.

>Don't take it the wrong way, but that sounds like a personal problem

Yes, and in addition one that exists regardless of what OS/WM/DE you're running, since Vim and Emacs configuraion works basically the same whatever platform they're on.

And now i wonder if this is a contributing factor to a certain big name DE stripping out options...

>Having to repeat some of those modifications 3-4 times because I'm using a slightly different terminal app for each individual task would, I think, drive me batty.

I have no idea what you're talking about. What are these "slightly different terminal apps"?

It's a play on switching WMs to handle different tasks. Perhaps not worded the best way.

That said, different terminal emulators do behave differently.

There's nothing forcing you to use the native terminal under a new DE/WM. If your neurons have hardened on the gnome-terminal way of doing things, it's no biggie to just keep using that under KDE or openbox or twm or whatever, modulo (maybe) a little twiddling of desktop shortcuts and menu entries and the like.

I do use a tiling manager on my linux laptop, but this is mostly because on a 13" screen every pixel counts. Also, the trackpad is really not good.

Nothing wrong with trying several environments until you find one which is the right one for you. But, hopping from one to another, like the article suggests, seems counterproductive to me.