[stinos]

The fact is, if you use your computer professionally and switch to linux, you start to understand what user interface efficiency is

That highly depends on what you do with your computer professionally though. So it might be a fact for some, but completely false for others.

I'm using a tiling window manager with pretty much any program customized to the point of being unrecognizable.

I played that game for years but gave up afterwards. Maybe I was doing it wrong but I spent just too much time to my liking on it. Now I'm more in a mindest of 'if you can't build me software which I can use almost as-is, I'll look for something else'. Not always ideal either and sometimes there are no alternatives so you'r stuck with crap after all. And yeah maybe I'm not using my computer as efficiently as possible (looking at some collegues though, I'm a wizard compared to their 'let's use a mouse for everything and double-clik to make sure it hits'-style), but I'm getting work done.

[profsnuggles]

Obviously do whatever works best for you. You don't have to spend a lot of time configuring your system to end up with something unrecognizable though. I've been running linux full time since 2003 and my $HOME directory can be traced directly back to then. Things start out as-is but then something would be mildly annoying so I'd spend 5 minutes reading the man page and change a setting. After a decade of that my environment evolved to suit me perfectly and even someone who knows the software I use would have trouble sitting in front of my PC and using it. However I never really spent days configuring anything. It was more of an accident.