My eccentric setup is enabled in part by a lot of continuity

I have an eccentric (computer) desktop, I use an eccentric shell, and I handle my email in an unusual way, which is enabled by our unusual mail system. In thinking recently about this and other eccentric things I do in my environment, I've realized that one significant thing enabling this is that I've had a lot of continuity in my computing life (due in part to a lot of continuity in jobs). It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that I've had fundamentally the same desktop for decades. Or to put it another way, I've never had to restart my work environment from scratch because I moved jobs, positions, or whatever.

This isn't really an experience that a lot of people have these days. Job changes are common and your new employer is going to issue you with a new computer and may well have strong opinions on what that computer runs (either directly or in the forms of programs you have to run to get your work done). If you can even import a version of your old environment, you have to be the kind of person who maintains your own copy of everything and keeps track of your changes and is willing to go to the work of installing things and setting up things and customizing acres of settings and so on and so forth. The more you change work computers, the easier it probably gets to use them in a more or less stock configuration. As one illustration of that, I don't bother setting up my eccentric shell on our machines that don't NFS mount my regular home directory; instead I use the default Ubuntu Bash setup.

(Developers have further challenges beyond what system administrators do, because of IDEs, development environments, and so on, especially when this involves commercial tools that your new employer either has bought for you (and wants to see you using that license) or would have to buy just for you (so you could keep using your preferred tool from your old job).)

I've been especially lucky in email tools. There are many places which don't run their own mail environment and so you're going to have to get on board with GMail or Outlook or whatever large provider is being used, and everyone will expect you to be integrated into the organization's standard email, calendaring, and so on tools that everyone else is using. Even using your own IMAP client in that environment can be hard.

(As I've discussed before, our own unusual email environment is that way because of backward compatibility with our long standing history, which is to say continuity with that history. If we started again from scratch we probably wouldn't build anything like the current system, and it's possible we wouldn't build an email system at all and would instead rely on the university's central email.)

Continuity in my environment is also what's let me build up and keep using a whole collection of custom tools, from small conveniences to things that have become important elements like a keyboard launcher (with a small but critical accelerator of it). With less continuity (but still a Linux environment) I'd probably wind up with something like my mildly customized Cinnamon setup, or perhaps something even more stock.