I've used Linux as my primary system since 2001 (WinXP wouldn't run on my PC at the time), with a wide variety of distros from Mandrake over Debian, Arch, Gentoo and a bunch of others. Usually going all out on customization and tweaking.
These days, I run an almost bone-stock KDE Neon (which is based on Ubuntu LTS), with a couple of PPAs added to get the latest versions of a couple of the applications I use the most, and that's about it. I keep the default desktop/panel layout and theme, the most customization I've done is turn off all notification sounds and switch to focus follows mouse with no auto-raise.
KDE gets out of my way and lets me do what I want perfectly fine in its default state.
Same for me. The one key feature (that everything else probably can be configured to do if it doesn't do it now out of the box) that I mold my workflow around is the ability to roll the mouse wheel on the background in KDE and switch virtual desktops that way. For command-line (which I'm in all the time), I use yakuake which slides a terminal window down from the top of the screen like Quake used to do with it's console. This simple feature makes it easy for me to switch between a gui-oriented way of thinking and handling the next coding change in a terminal. You can peel off another shell in yakuake and surf between them. Silly, I know, but for me it works great.
These days, I run an almost bone-stock KDE Neon (which is based on Ubuntu LTS), with a couple of PPAs added to get the latest versions of a couple of the applications I use the most, and that's about it. I keep the default desktop/panel layout and theme, the most customization I've done is turn off all notification sounds and switch to focus follows mouse with no auto-raise.
KDE gets out of my way and lets me do what I want perfectly fine in its default state.