Over the years I have been going more and more towards the text interface side. It turned out that very few things are inherently graphical. If you know how to use a shell and a text editor you have the opportunity to do everything in a very straightforward way. That way can be very seductive as it never changes all that much. You can go decades without having to learn anything significantly different. The world of the big time desktop environment is still finding its way. It has been a mostly a bunch of arbitrary changes so far so for now at least I choose the simple way.

That's not a modern Linux desktop setup. For that, you'll need to see the default install of an up to date distro. Spoilers: it looks like the desktop of any modern OS. For example, GNOME resembles OS X.

Eye candy remains available. One of the things I love about Linux on the desktop is that you're free to use that stuff or not, according to personal taste. And personally, I find that eye candy reduces the space available for text, which is much more information-dense. A screenshot from my machine would look much like the one in the article.

> I find that eye candy reduces the space available for text

Not all eye-candy does that. Some years ago, because I missed having some eye-candy, I installed a compositor, made my windows translucent and got them to do opening and closing animations. I also put a screensaver as a moving background. It looked very cool and was just as information dense as it was originally. However, with so much eye-candy, it was hard to focus on the content and I felt my eyes strained. I ended up feeling much better when I turned it all off.

Right now, I don't even have a background, but I find information-dense tiling-wm setups have their own aesthetics. If you asked me what looked cooler / better / more usable, a "modern" GUI (like Windows, OSX, or Ubuntu's default) or a tiling-wm setup with mainly terminal windows, I'd have to say it's the latter.