Alas, since the author only looked at the past 20 year it misses out on the time when alternatives like Enlightenment [https://www.enlightenment.org/] were shipped in Red Hat Linux. I have fond memories of the cool eye candy from transparent terminal windows, along with configurable window decoration in a variety of styles running on one of the first 1GHz Athlon systems (which was an interesting system in its own right as it had a cooling system with a compressor that lowered the temperature of the CPU down to -40C). The Gnome project has thrown away so much functionality over the years under the mantra of "the next re-write will fix everything!" <sigh>