I only dabble in ricing honestly.
My last system was Arch with Openbox/XFCE, and that was my first foray into ricing. It has a liquid CPU cooler, and started overheating while I was in the middle of a video project so I jumped to this box and went with Ubuntu/Gnome because I'm most familiar with it.
I mostly do video/audio/2D-design so Tiling VM isn't really that helpful to me, but it's still fun if I had the time.

Just curious, what kind of engineering do you do with Linux? And which distro do you use?