[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.