Fwiw. the desktop I use to earn money looks something out of /r/unixporn, except that it's ugly (no background, etc). Tiling window manager, a few pixel wide borders, firefox (without toolbar, scrollbars, menubar) and a whole lot of xterms with tmux and my favorite 16 colors.

I don't have a pretty background picture, fancy IRC setup or a desktop bar with the song that's playing so it's not worth posting screenshots, but it gets the job done and it's very easy to replicate when I get a new computer (ie. just copy dotfiles over, no need to poke around in config menus of a bunch of applications).