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.
