I spend a great deal of time in front of my computer and aesthetics matter. I don't necessarily mean colors or fancy whizz-bangery (although it's obvious I care at least a little) but more the way I interact with the software. Window management, keybindings, workspaces and such. Sure, it has to look good but functionality is more important.
I also have a short attention span and change my DE or window manager at least a couple of times a year. This should see us through until early next year and the inevitable Hyprland/Wayland transition.
Obviously this isn't for everyone. Actually, I wouldn't suggest doing any of this, but it works for me.
The basics are pretty simple. I'm running an Arch based distro -- Endeavour OS along with the awesomewm window manager.
Thorium and a couple of terminals.
I'm using Kitty for the terminal. I go back and forth between Kitty and Alacritty but find Kitty a little crazy and over-featured. I'm not going to use emoji in a terminal and I'm sure as heck not going to multiplex in a tiling wm. I don't even use tabs.
However, in this instance I went with Kitty. I wanted to use the Ranger file manger and found Alacritty image previews inconsistent -- with Kitty they just worked out of the box. One caveat to Kitty is that it didn't play nicely with my remote servers, you have to specifically invoke the Kitty SSH plugin (called, with a cringe, Kittens) but a quick shell alias makes it simple enough.
Ranger running in the Kitty terminal.