As all Emacers know, there are several premade Emacs configurations available that allow a n00b to start using Emacs with a complete system that includes practically every package that they could need. One often sees new Emacs users who started with, say, Doom Emacs, and decided to drop back to vanilla Emacs.
That brings up the question of what a new Emacs user should do. Should they start with vanilla Emacs or one of the advanced configurations. Chris Maiorana has some thoughts on this. He asks, is it better to start learning Emacs from the beginning or to jump into a package that has everything configured?
Maiorana posits that’s it’s better to start with vanilla Emacs even if you end up with something like Doom. His reasoning is that you learn the Emacs fundamentals and will understand how Emacs works and how configurations such as Doom modify that behavior.
He’s got a pretty good argument for starting out with a bare bone Emacs and only later moving on to one of the premade configurations. I agree with his suggestions. That’s what I did when I moved to Emacs. The difference is that I never moved off regular old Emacs and have been happy to stay with vanilla Emacs augmented with a few packages that I, personally, have found useful.