A more positive perspective, they want to learn what they can do. I remember trying every distribution, DE, and window manager when I started with Linux. These days I stick with stock GNOME on Fedora.

When I was a teenager, my father brought an Ubuntu 6.06 CD home from his workplace. It didn’t interest him much, but he let me play with it on an old family computer. Once the setup finished I spent as much time as I could playing with the colour scheme, figuring out how to install Compiz for the cube animation, and making Kingdom Hearts wallpapers. Those activities were mostly playful, but they ended up helping me get exposure to tools like cd, ls, and apt-get.

Today I feel a lot more confident in using Linux (or any Unix, really), but that’s likely 100% due to having time to spend playing and being curious.

There’s a lot of discussion about an education in computing helping people get ahead economically, but part of me wonders how much proficiency comes from being a child on a Commodore 64 than learning express+mongodb in a few weeks (not that being the latter is a bad thing, either!).

Now, that's cynical, isn't it.

I do have several setups, each for a separated task. It depends on what you do. E.g. doing creative stuff, it can be annoying when you get constantly derailed by one darn ugly UI like Gnome3. Now, you don't need to dabble with eyecandy every full moon, but there is nothing wrong with setting it up once for a specific workflow, is there?

Same here. Even when I switched laptop it was a painless: copy homedir, apt-get the same packages I had in the old one, let it cook for a while, and I was up and running with not a hiccup.

The only secret is to use hardware you know beforehand is well supported.