My unusual X desktop wasn't made 'from scratch' in a conventional sense
There are people out there who set up unusual (Unix) environments for themselves from scratch; for example, Mike Hoye recently wrote Idiosyncra. While I have an unusual desktop, I haven't built it from scratch in quite the same way that Mike Hoye and other people have; instead I've wound up with my desktop through a rather easier process.
It would be technically accurate to say that my current desktop environment has been built up gradually over time (including over the time I've been writing Wandering Thoughts, such as my addition of dmenu). But this isn't really how it happened, in that I didn't start from a normal desktop and slowly change it into my current one. The real story is that the core of my desktop dates from the days when everyone's X desktops looked like mine does. Technically there were what we would call full desktops back in those days, if you had licensed the necessary software from your Unix vendor and chose to run it, but hardware was sufficiently slow back then that people at universities almost always chose to run more lightweight environments (especially since they were often already using the inexpensive and slow versions of workstations).
(Depending on how much work your local university system administrators had done, your new Unix account might start out with the Unix vendor's X setup, or it could start out with what X11R<whatever> defaulted to when built from source, or it might be some locally customized setup. In all cases you often were left to learn about the local tastes in X desktops and how to improve yours from people around you.)
To show how far back this goes (which is to say how little of it has been built 'from scratch' recently), my 1996 SGI Indy desktop has much of the look and the behavior of my current desktop, and its look and behavior wasn't new then; it was an evolution of my desktop from earlier Unix workstations. When I started using Linux, I migrated my Indy X environment to my new (and better) x86 hardware, and then as Linux has evolved and added more and more things you have to run to have a usable desktop with things like volume control, your SSH agent, and automatically mounted removable media, I've added them piece by piece (and sometimes updated them as how you do this keeps changing).
(At some point I moved from twm as my window manager to fvwm, but that was merely redoing my twm configuration in fvwm, not designing a new configuration from scratch.)
I wouldn't want to start from scratch today to create a new custom desktop environment; it would be a lot of work (and the one time I looked at it I wound up giving up). Someday I will have to move from X, fvwm, dmenu, and so on to some sort of Wayland based environment, but even when I do I expect to make the result as similar to my current X setup as I can, rather than starting from a clean sheet design. I know what I want because I'm very used to my current environment and I've been using variants of it for a very long time now.
(This entry was sparked by Ian Z aka nobrowser's comment on my entry from yesterday.)
PS: Part of the long lineage and longevity of my X desktop is that I've been lucky and determined enough to use Unix and X continuously at work, and for a long time at home as well. So I've never had a time when I moved away from X on my desktop(s) and then had to come back to reconstruct an environment and catch it up to date.
PPS: This is one of the roots of my xdm heresy, where
my desktops boot into a text console and I log in there to manually
start X with a personal script that's a derivative of the ancient
startx
command.
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