In the nineties I had endless time to customise and fix the system, but these days I have so much work to do beyond the OS that I really can't spend much time at all on making the OS work.
I actually like a simple-to-use end-user DE like KDE as a container for terminal and browser windows. And I like that USB sticks can be mounted with a simple click, so I can copy something and tell the person that's bugging me to disappear with the stick so I can work on.
I remember an open-source and security conference around 2000 where I was wondering why all the hackers had default RedHat (or SuSE) installations with default Gnome or KDE and default backgrounds instead of nicely customised machines like mine. It took me some years to realise they were on stage because they got things done and didn't spend half of their time playing with settings, themes, backgrounds, fonts and convenience scripts.
Discovering GNU/Linux in the 90's meant playing with configuration files and themes for fvwm (the original not the rewrite one), twm, AfterStep, WindowMaker, GNOME, KDE, Sawmill, Enlightment, Metacity and a few others.
I also don't have the time nor the patience to do it any longer and just take the default install.
Which currently means Unity with Ubuntu on my travel netbook.
I respect your opinion but I gave this up when the default kept fucking changing. I didn't have time for the endless breaking bullshit introduced by distros wanting to be cool with their desktop. Now I am using roughly the same config as I did in the 90's. Openbox (was blackbox back then) + ROX filer and a custom context menu with a few items. Any machine I use now, I have a tarfile with my settings I unpack, then install openbox and rox. I will probably use this setup for as long as I live, or until they quit keeping them running on new distros.
To preempt the usual disagreement when I say this, I have never consistently been able to get projectors/second monitor working in Linux on a laptop, so I have learned to live without these. This is also why you see Linux devs doing presentations using Windows/OS X.
I used to use Gnome for the same reason; Everything just about works correctly out of the box. It's really quite a good system.
Then I got really fed up with always messing up my terminals and switched to awesome as my window manager. It's more pleasant to use, especially with multiple monitors. The downside was that it's taken quite a lot of effort to customize it enough to make it work even half as smoothly as Gnome does (which basically means running half of gnome's services in the background).
If someone took Gnome and replaced gnome-shell with a modern compositing tiling window manager with some (optional) 3d eye candy thrown in, I would switch to it in a heartbeat. Hopefully there will be a tiling compositor for Wayland eventually.
This is essentially my reason set. I run KDE + (whatever) whenever I am doing desktop linux. It works, out of the box, in a UI paradigm that I can use effectively (tip to designers: this is essentially windows 98 paradigm, with minor tweaks).
I don't want to fart with random scripts I have to cook up and futz with to get a working system.
The things I want to hack are the things that are coming out of my own work, not making someone else's work useable.
Same with me. I prefer Gnome to KDE because I've a feeling that it saves me half of mouse clicks but Gnome, KDE Unity or what else save so much configuration time. Furthermore it's easier to google solutions when something goes wrong, which in turn are extra time savings.
In the nineties I had endless time to customise and fix the system, but these days I have so much work to do beyond the OS that I really can't spend much time at all on making the OS work.
I actually like a simple-to-use end-user DE like KDE as a container for terminal and browser windows. And I like that USB sticks can be mounted with a simple click, so I can copy something and tell the person that's bugging me to disappear with the stick so I can work on.
I remember an open-source and security conference around 2000 where I was wondering why all the hackers had default RedHat (or SuSE) installations with default Gnome or KDE and default backgrounds instead of nicely customised machines like mine. It took me some years to realise they were on stage because they got things done and didn't spend half of their time playing with settings, themes, backgrounds, fonts and convenience scripts.