My workstation is my IDE. Or as close to it as I can make it.
> As for operating systems, window managers etc., I couldn't care less
And we should not have to. So I personally go out of the way to rid my workstation of stuff that is not what I care about.
This is a point I have been making too: everyone has a "DE". Whether you integrate it yourself by tiling a text editor and a shell or two, or if emacs or Xcode does it for you doesn't matter.
What matters is that when you are in your development environment - it's free of distractions and promotes your workflow.
When I launch an IDE, the IDE is now my window manager. I never need to leave it. Just like your OS is your development environment, the equivalent is that my IDE is my "OS" for doing work. And by the analogy that you don't want unrelated crap in your OS - an IDE is often created only as a tool for professional development.
So that's why I don't care if my OS looks cluttered behind my IDE, or if it comes with 100 apps I don't need.
It's exactly as if your development OS was a VM running inside any other OS. When you are developing, you would not care what the host OS was.