Is it? The vast majority of the time, I change settings/set things up the way I want, and then... leave them for literally years. Hell, I can directly restore a backup I have of Sublime Text from years ago and my customizations will work.
Somewhere along the way I lost interest in customizing the OS. These days I routinely switch between MacOS, Windows and various Linux flavors on lots of computers. The only thing I may customize is I write my .vimrc from memory.
On my Android phones, I change the wallpaper and I disable animations. Otherwise, stock everything.
Now that I think about it, it can't be the time saved, surely I waste more time on HN. It likely correlates more with using computers for work as opposed to for fun and learning. Even the learning I do these days is rather stressful - if I can steal an hour or two on the weekend, I feel lucky, so spending time to customize the environment seems like a waste.
Maybe if life slows down, I'll find joy in customizing my OSes again.
On the note of programming not being fun anymore, that's exactly why I'm making my secret project that I hope to release very very soon, maybe in a week or so. I want to make programming fun again, in a similar way that pico8 did, but x100.
> I have the same history customizing everything! ... then giving up because life gets busy.
I think this might be why some people have such different experiences. I don't try to customize "everything" - just what needs to be. Like, yeah, I would expect it to be difficult to maintain random Explorer customizations. I would not expect it to be difficult to maintain customization for a popular IDE.
Too much software put host-specific stuff in settings files (like absolute paths) or just are not stable enough in general that it is worth trying to maintain a portable configuration.
The hard part of maintaining a config is that there's no such thing as cost-free usage, it always takes a mental toll to change a config, to learn a new config, to remember which configs are in use and what they do, to backup configs, or at least to setup and maintain a config-auto-backup flow.
By far, the easiest mental model is just learning how everything works out of the box, and getting used to it. Then again, sometimes what people want is to do things the hard way for its own sake. That's probably part of why I kept going back to C over and over for so many years.
The oldest parts of my emacs config go back at least 30 years and I have had it in a git repo for ~15. I keep my entire .emacs.d versioned, including all third-party packages I depend on (so no fetching of anything from the cloud).
Have had to do at most minimal changes when upgrading to newer versions and with some tiny amount of work the same config still works for emacs from around version 21 to 31 (but features are of course missing in older versions).