For me, I really want to get into niri, but the lack of XWayland support scares me (I know there’s solutions, but I don’t understand them yet).
Also, I stopped using Emacs (even though I love its design and philosophy with my whole heart) because it’s very slow, even as a daemon.
You don’t have to… if the project you want to use has a good setup process. Otherwise you’ll be scouring Docker docs, GitHub issues, and StackOverflow for years.