Simplicity and organization can be very Zen, my friend.

Perhaps instead of judging yourself so harshly, you consider that others may see the positives of simplicity and small-scale as well.

Not everybody needs big and flashy. Utilitarian isn't a bad thing. Utilitarian simplicity can be its own art form.

Hi .. so ... Um wanna be friends? whats your favorite font?

If your setup allows you to be a productive member of society, you're golden mental health wise. /s

You may want to get your eyes checked if watching HD video on a tiny screen seems preferable unless all your content fits your displays native resolution; I am fairly certain my eyes are terrible. Maybe that's why I love that dark themes are becoming more popular.

Transparency is nice, but Windows Vista is partially what converted me to Linux. I dislike rounded corners too, since content is always rectangular.

I don't know why no mainstream desktop OS really has a good mouse driven tiling setup out of the box. I have a dual screen setup, so I mostly just full screen apps and alt tab if needed which reduces distraction. If I'm trying to focus on a single thing, the second screen gets turned off.

I find myself becoming more minimalist over time as well. Society seems to be more distraction driven by the day, so having an OS that stays out of the way is a boon.

When I'm in a GUI, I like the Win95 UI paradigm. That's one of the few good things that came out of Microsoft: I like the classic Windows look-and-feel. That's why I run Mint / Cinnamon. I've tried minimalistic tiling window managers and I can't stand them.

However - and that's the weird thing - most of what I do in Cinnamon is open terminals with tmux that I... tile. And within one tmux pane or window, there's a very good chance I'll run vim with several files edited in split screens 🙂

I spend 75% of my time working in a terminal - sometimes in a real Linux console, but most of the time in a Cinnamon terminal. And I'll do the minimalistic thing within the terminal because that's how I've been rolling since the early eighties and it's just how my workflow is most efficient. But I really like the Windows-like graphical environment around the terminals. Call me weird...

I'm gonna come clean: I used awesome wm for years, never touched the configuration once 😹. Now I do the same with gnome

I am mostly a windows user these days, but fifteen years ago I ran Linux as my main OS.

I ran Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude E5400, at first I ran Gnome 2 or KDE 4 as my DE, but got annoyed with how much vertical space they used, so I learned how to use Fluxbox.

Fluxbox is great, a small stacking WM, that is easy to configure and worked like I wanted it.

I still set it up to run gnome-settings-daemon as I had no idea on how to do apply a GTK theme without it.

The really annoying part of running fluxbox as a WM was that I never figured out how to shut down the computer from a menu, it allways complained about me not having permissions to shut down the computer, so I used to do a log off and before the GDM login screen loaded I could press the power button on the laptop and have it shutdown the computer gracefully, timing was key, but it worked.

Do you use a dock or bar? I find it hard to justify it these days. It tells me the time, thats about it.