Oh, I've done both of these: I've given up customising my computing environment, and taken up exercise. It's now something like 25 years since I first installed Slackware off floppy discs, I've been there and no longer regard it as a useful use of my limited time.

The thinking environment of choice of the most productive, smartest person I've ever worked with was .. a notepad. Not Notepad, a physical A4 ruled paper notepad and an ordinary gel pen. The actual development inevitably required some typing, but the thinking process and its associated diagrams, calculations, and scribbles for the kind of maths-heavy work he was excellent at worked best on paper.

(I currently have vscode open .. and actual Visual Studio, and IntelliJ, and notepad++, each with a different set of files open in different languages.)