In school I had a physics teacher who thought it was a good idea one day to use whiteboard markers on the glass windows instead of the whiteboard. I didn't learn anything that lesson.
Luckily most gui toolkits have a way of disabling CSD. For gtk/libadwaita I recommend something like Gradience to generate a theme with corners of your liking.
Effects aside compiz was just gorgeous, every time i go looking for window decorations on pling it always seems like the pretty ones were made for just compiz
I will spend an entire weekend ricing my desktop in just the right way.
Then I'll notice that one of my main apps doesn't adhere to the theming i've designed, or that <insert random condition here> will completely break my theming because <insert weird OS quirk here>, or If I change my wallpaper it will make my entire theme look like shit, or that my cool theme makes font unreadable on one app because it renders shit weird, or that I completely overlooked this one aspect of my workflow that my cool design fucks with.
Then I'll just say fuck it and go back to using standard Gnome.
There's an extension that lets me close and open windows with the Matrix Code Rain so I can pretend I'm cool n shit.
Every few years I get the customization bug and trick out my desktop. Then things start breaking down slowly. Then I get frustrated and reinstall vanilla gnome, swear off customization forever, and feel better.
For gaming its Plasma.
Knowing the default DE's idiosyncrasies also helps with work -- I'm never surprised when I reinstall/install a new machine. Same goes for aliases. No for me, knowing the commands themselves, however cumbersome or verbose, helps me better deal with freshly installed machines.
Same here, improved imprived improved.
I have been looking to switch to sway and experimented with qtile (... Wayland is the future yo).
One thing that stops from moving is feh. I know wayland has it's own lightweight, image viewer, background setter. But feh is all in one.
The closest thing is imv, but I cant get it to render raw images.
(.. i am aware feh does work in wayland using xwayland but not natively.)
I personally do like all the eye candy, especially animations and round borders, but sometimes i do enjoy using compositors without any of that just as a change of pace. I also really like river for example.