Absurd fallacies of "minimalist" Linux setups
I, too, have been an avid connoisseur of linux distros and have had my fair share of distrohopping every time the next shiny thing barges into the Linux world. And in canonical nerd culture, it seems the next stage is to move into the titular "minimalism" aesthetic - where you only use the terminal and tiling window managers and emaciated distros with everything user-friendly chopped off. I tried it out and was immediately struck by the sheer absurdity - these peculiar setups are a lot of things, but "simple" and "minimalist" they are absolutely not.
Linux people seem to be holding a very warped view of what minimalism means. They think of it only in terms of aesthetics and puritanism, and LARP as digital ascetics living for "simplicity" all the while burying themselves in several layers of self-imposed complexity and worthless dogma - custom keybindings, tiling window managers that require memorizing 37 commands, hand-rolled init systems, and dotfile repos larger than some startups’ codebases. This is, for the lack of a better word, straight-up asinine.
There is only one correct metric that should be counted when dealing with software, and that is the user's cognitive load. Computers and the programs running on it are tools and their purpose is to be functional, not decorative. If my Windows/Python/Notepad++ setup is more ubiquitous, understandable, intuitive and replicable than your obscure Arch/Hyprland build with its hundred painstakingly typed-out customizations for every single software in it, then my setup is better and more minimalist than yours. Full stop. Feel free to pride yourself in the elaborate craftsmanship of what you have made, but don't live in delusion that your thing is somehow "simple" or "minimalist".