It's a phase. I used to try and customize everything, tiling window managers, custom color schemes, Arch, etc. Right now I'm on a Mac so vanilla I didn't even change the wallpaper.
Was about to mention this. 25y+ linux user here, we all had our ricing phase, where we'd customize our desktop and shell to oblivion. Now, I'm always on a as-vanilla-as-possible Ubuntu machine, or a Macbook with the same default wallpaper that came when I bought it.
The only thing I do to my new systems is installing oh-my-zsh, because that gives me a lot of goodies for basically zero configuration (I just use and learned the default presets to be "my own")
Since we're now bragging about how vanilla our systems are, the only things I install are wezterm, nushell, helix, nix. I've moved everything else into git repo's so they're no longer system configs, but project configs.
Last week I took a repo full of notes about the sizes of building materials and made inkscape and gimp "dependencies" of that project.
Next time I install Linux I think I'm going to make the filesystem immutable so that I not only don't configure it, but can't.
I guess I am still in that phase then, after 25y+ of Linux. Not that I rice constantly but that I configure my desktop exactly how I like it and then let it stay. Usually the ricing/configuring comes when I buy new hardware.. so not that often. Or when a major change like Wayland comes around which is what made switch from Arch/X11/Bspwm to Arch/Wayland/Hyperland. I have tried but can not use vanilla for long... I just have to adapt the system to me. I feel constrained if I have to adapt to the system.
i'm using the default macos wallpaper as well. i almost never see the desktop, anyways... on my sway desktop, i don't have gaps or anything -- doesn't matter to me, i'm too busy doing something.
