At some point I realized that I wasted months in those rabbit holes customizing and tweaking shell configs, window managers and Emacs. Any gain in productivity

At some point I realized that I wasted months in those rabbit holes customizing and tweaking shell configs, window managers and Emacs. Any gain in productivity (which may not even be there as it is rather subjective) was not able to offset it. So I stopped it. These days I just use Gnome Shell with a single extension to fix something that I cannot get used at all, simple bash config to setup environment for development with no customization on shell behavior, and a programming editor that mostly matches my taste. On a new machine I can finish all customization within 5 minutes and forget about it. I even started to suspect that an easy customization of a tool can be a bad sign. It is almost like developers delegates all usability issues to the end user making the default case really bad.