Hi, i'm kinda new to ricing but i will try to answer it:
Yes, i'm using pywal for colorscheme sometimes
Looks up for documentation of the program that i want to customize (i.e: neovim, qtile, etc)
Github (and also toss everything out because i'm bored, don't do what i did)
Depends. If it a minimal distro (btw), yes. If it a complete distro, i will try to fiddle around first with the default config they have. Then customize the hell out of it
I hope this helps :)