Years ago, I spent inordinate amount of time on that kind of thing. At some point I realised that while enjoyable no work gets done. Nowadays I don't have a work "flow". I just work which for me means reading and writing code or emails without interruptions. Any "flow" on top of that is a waste of time. My experince for whatever it's worth.
Over the last 20 years, I've heard this often. "I don't need to learn no VCS, I get work done by copying files". "I don't need no IDE and semantic navigation, I'm productive with Notepad+". "I don't need no ticket manager, a shared TODO file is more than enough".
Everyone has a work flow. It can be simple or complex, self-made or partly-compulsory. Some will try to always use better tools, other will try to keep the plainest environment. I believe it's a good practice to at least know what other people can do.
It took me many years to discover and build an environment where I feel confortable and productive. I spend many days working for this, but now it has hardly changed in 5 years. I think that time was an excellent investment.
I'm with you on this one. Back in college I used to spend an absurd amount of time tinkering with XMonad, rainmeter, custom themes, but now my requirements for a computer are:
- it has a basic window manager (half screen left/right, full screen)
- it has emacs
- it has Firefox
- it has tmux
- (if the computer is really fancy) it has a calendar application
If all you do is reading and writing code and processing emails, and you don't want to waste time, workflow is very important, since it minimises interruptions.
Maybe you mixed up "tinkering" for workflow improvement with "tinkering" for the sake of it.
The advantage of GNU/Linux here is that once you nail it, you never have to change it again. Your OS will outlive your hardware; you simply transplant it, together with your workflow.
