> I have never understood why people felt the need for all this desktop customization and setup.
Compatibility with existing muscle memory.
In 1989, I took a .twmrc file from a friend, which mapped alt-mouse1 to move, alt-mouse2 to resize and alt-mouse3 to iconify. Those mappings became muscle memory over the next 17 years of twm and ctwm and KDE use.
At that point, my whitebox died and I decided to get an iMac because I was very busy with work and personal life, and didn't want to spend a lot of time building/configuring a new whitebox. MacOS was *nix, so how bad could it be? Well, I ended up fighting MacOS tooth and nail, as I could never get my mappings to work reliably. That lead me to use X11 for a lot of things, but that inter-operated poorly with native apps. After about 9 months, I gave up on Mac as a desktop and gave the iMac to my then-inlaws and built a whitebox.
So I feel strongly that the ability to tweak things like this, even if they are never used, can be crucial to some people.
In fact, I'd very much like to covert to using my M1 mbp as a desktop with a dock, but I simply cannot function using Mac's window management on a deskop. I've tried all kinds of tweaks and add-on to get the behavior I want, and they all fail in some way.
I understand the muscle memory argument. Over 30+ year career, I’ve bounced back and forth between Unix, windows, and MacOS a few times and as such lost that subconscious level of system operation you get from that muscle memory for a period of time. Definitely it can be a pain in the ass. I think my difference is that in most cases when I was doing a platform shift, I was doing an app shifts at the same time. So it just became necessary to relearn anyway. I can see if your app platform stays the same and your OS changes, that could create some frustration where tweaking would be more important.
Back in 2008 when I made my last shift the MacOS caused me some frustration because I was expecting window management to work like Windows. Took some time to get past it, but now how it works is my expectation. Lately I have found with moving to iPadOS more and more for non-business computing needs, that when I work on my MBP, I maximize everything and just alt-tab between it all. Windows management needs are almost nil.
Compatibility with existing muscle memory.
In 1989, I took a .twmrc file from a friend, which mapped alt-mouse1 to move, alt-mouse2 to resize and alt-mouse3 to iconify. Those mappings became muscle memory over the next 17 years of twm and ctwm and KDE use.
At that point, my whitebox died and I decided to get an iMac because I was very busy with work and personal life, and didn't want to spend a lot of time building/configuring a new whitebox. MacOS was *nix, so how bad could it be? Well, I ended up fighting MacOS tooth and nail, as I could never get my mappings to work reliably. That lead me to use X11 for a lot of things, but that inter-operated poorly with native apps. After about 9 months, I gave up on Mac as a desktop and gave the iMac to my then-inlaws and built a whitebox.
So I feel strongly that the ability to tweak things like this, even if they are never used, can be crucial to some people.
In fact, I'd very much like to covert to using my M1 mbp as a desktop with a dock, but I simply cannot function using Mac's window management on a deskop. I've tried all kinds of tweaks and add-on to get the behavior I want, and they all fail in some way.