My desktop progression has been
1989: twm
1995: ctwm
2000: kde
2022: lxde
I moved from ctwm to kde because they accepted a patch that allowed me to maintain some modifier/mouse shortcuts I had configured in twm. Gnome rejected my patch
Moved to lxde because kde got too complex and hard to deal with
Still run tcsh with a .cshrc migrated from one i cloned from a friend at university
I’ve been on a bsd based workstation since the 80s with a few years on Mac and linux. Sunos->ultrix->osf/1 -> FreeBSD (on alpha) -> FreeBSD i386 -> macOS x -> Ubuntu-> FreeBSD/amd64
About 15 years ago I tried xmonad, a tiling window manager, and I was hooked. I moved to awesome a few years later and that has been my desktop ever since. I still pretty much use only emacs, terminals, and a web browser in my daily work, and that goes back even further than my use of tiling window managers.
Mine is unchanged since I switched from DOS (Borland) to Windows (Visual C++/Visual Studio) development in 1995. If I sat 1995 me down in front of my PC it wouldn't take more than a couple of mins to figure everything out. He'd be confused about all the AI panes on the dev apps, though, I suspect.
(I've also never had a window tiled in my life; every window maximized at all times to avoid noise)
I remember those days, Fvwm2[1] was brilliant with its multiple screens and controlling the mouse using arrow keys - good times. Amazingly difficult to config even if you could get Xconfig to support your setup (external refresh rates and supported screen sizes and drivers for video cards).
But over the years I've come to appreciate the simplicity of Mac. Initially it didn't even have multiple screens but you could install (I forget the name) an application that simulated the multiple screens of Fvwm2. Right from the start I was glad for the simplicity of just having everything work or it wasn't supported - there was no in-between.
Today I'm using Spaces with iTerm2 and Emacs as core development tools. Not much different from my Fvwm2, xterm and Emacs in xterm solution from 25 years ago. Pity really that nothing has fundamentally changed in code development.
