You should take a look at what the guys on /r/unixporn do.
The percentage of actual "this is the desktop I use to earn money" shots is minute.
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).
I've got tmux with a 25 point font and 16 colours now :-) Happy as a clam. Would be nice to have a browser that I could bend to my will... Some people will never get it, but this is a very nice setup if you know how to use it.
(but as someone else mentioned, I run compton because I like stupid effects and drop shadows... crazy, right?)
I have a svn repo that I keep all my dot-files in. Whenever I get a new install I just check it out. I have a script that copies them into place, with some variables where machines need to be different. It works pretty well
I'm using the same combo right now, but /r/unixporn just isn't as exciting to me as it was maybe a year ago. Everything posted there seems to follow one specific path nowadays.
From Wikipedia [1]:
"The practice of engineering in the UK is not a regulated profession [...] In Continental Europe, Latin America, Turkey and elsewhere the title is limited by law to people with an engineering degree and the use of the title by others is illegal."