>I personally always try to use some alternatives at the same time (XFCE, KDE, macOS / C++, Python, Go, etc.) to see what others are doing.
That's great, I do the same thing so I can relate to you, but I hope you understand that the bar for contributions to an open source project is generally more like "did you write code that the maintainer wants to merge" and not "you must familiarize yourself with all alternatives." How you achieve that varies and not everybody has the time to spend searching around on distro forums and Github. Some people might only ever familiarize themselves with one or two open source projects that they use and contribute to. And it's hard for me to see something wrong with that, that's their prerogative.
I personally always try to use some alternatives at the same time (XFCE, KDE, macOS / C++, Python, Go, etc.) to see what others are doing.
This allowed me to think both out of the box and carry good ideas between systems. Some examples:
- Implement just works approach in a set of python utilities developed for a project. Extended development time a little but, removed setup from so many nodes so it compensated itself and allowed me to sleep well at night.
- Copying GNOME2's desktop layout to KDE with some macOS influences allows me to become extremely efficient in my Desktop systems. Since it contains something from everything, everything other DE is familiar and I'm also more efficient in them ("This is UNIX, I know how to use it!" effect).