(recent Xoogler here) There is quite a lot of freedom, though if you do custom stuff it's just not supported. I usually replaced the desktop, installed a custom

(recent Xoogler here) There is quite a lot of freedom, though if you do custom stuff it's just not supported. I usually replaced the desktop, installed a custom terminal app, etc. There is also a lot of freedom in IDE choice - you can use literally whatever you want, it's just that the support is crappy if you don't use a supported one. And Vim support was IIRC completely volunteer based - there was no vim team, just people working on plugins and building releases as 20% etc. I contributed one plugin which sadly not a lot of people used, but Googlers out there - try BlazeDebugCurrentTest (it's part of the Blaze plugin) or something like that! Actually one of my favorite Google experiences starting out was that I wanted to work with an Apple Magic Keyboard, and to get proper support for it I needed to compile some kernel driver I found on github. I asked IT support if I can do that, and the answer was "you're a SWE, review the code, make sure it looks legit and doesn't contain any security holes, and then it's your responsibility if you mess anything up". Which I did, and it worked just fine. It was in 2018 so it's not like I'm referring to some early days thing.