Everyone has a work flow. It can be simple or complex, self-made or partly-compulsory. Some will try to always use better tools, other will try to keep the plainest environment. I believe it's a good practice to at least know what other people can do.
It took me many years to discover and build an environment where I feel confortable and productive. I spend many days working for this, but now it has hardly changed in 5 years. I think that time was an excellent investment.
- it has a basic window manager (half screen left/right, full screen)
- it has emacs
- it has Firefox
- it has tmux
- (if the computer is really fancy) it has a calendar application
Back to square one.
Maybe you mixed up "tinkering" for workflow improvement with "tinkering" for the sake of it.
The advantage of GNU/Linux here is that once you nail it, you never have to change it again. Your OS will outlive your hardware; you simply transplant it, together with your workflow.