What draws people to Linux is the possibility of tinkering. It's not like tinkerers are always procrastinators but they prefer tasks that engage their "tinkerer sense": trying out a new API or maybe doing something unusual with an old one.

Doing something mundane with a known API is something they will avoid. Such tasks are probably in the majority of those found even in the most exciting jobs. This is what I believe to be the cause of the association.

Source: generalizing my own experience to the whole population of Earth. Btw, I gotta get back to work too.

Well, where there's much to play with, you end up playing much.

I frequently find myself playing in my .vimrc, .screenrc, .bashrc and other confs to not much obvious productive output.

Changing window managers, console terminals and anything basically, all in excuse of not working on job at hand.

On the upper hand, beats playing solitaire.