You have alternatives though. I've been using basically the same linux environment for about a decade now.
I don't have a proper desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, just Xorg and StumpWM as a window manager. Then I have Firefox, Emacs and urxvt running tmux. I use a handful of GTK applications when the need arises like Gimp, Inkscape, Evince and maybe a couple others. Done.
It boots up in a few seconds from a SSD, it's always snappy. It worked fine on a core2duo and HDD 10 years ago, it works even better on an i5 and SSD now.
Yeah I have a Linux environment on a keychain USB device that I now use often enough to think seriously about abandoning Windows (though I don't hate Win as such, but kept using it because of some applications I relied upon).
Linux has (sometimes) had sort of the opposite problem, insufficient innovation in user interface design. I'm looking forward to Gnome 3 now; I felt that when CSS took over the web a lot of UI innovation moved to the server end and stalled at the client (think the really long hiatus in the development of Enlightenment, which was at one time the cutting edge of UI design/customizability while still being fast and responsive).
If you want ideas for where Linux capabilities should b going, please go check out Flowstone, which I think is criminally under-appreciated. The current version uses Ruby, but previous incarnations allowed you deploy code in C or assembler(!) within the visual programming environment. It's doin' me a heckin' confuse that this isn't a standard development environment option for everything from shell scripts to large-scale applications. Once you go to flow-based programming text-only IDEs look masochistic and pointless, and text-only is a terrible way to teach programming to people because discovery and syntax are inaccessible and really better done by computers. I like NoFlo for js development but the Linux desktop is crying out to be brought into a flow-based paradigm.
Sorry about going a bit off-topic but when I see exhortations to go with extremely simple solutions like StumpWM I have the opposite-but-similar reaction to the OP: why am I running some beast of a computer (at least by historical standards) so I can have a 20 year old user interface? Surely there is some middle ground between cancerous levels of abstraction/feature creep and monk-like asceticism.
I don't have a proper desktop environment like Gnome or KDE, just Xorg and StumpWM as a window manager. Then I have Firefox, Emacs and urxvt running tmux. I use a handful of GTK applications when the need arises like Gimp, Inkscape, Evince and maybe a couple others. Done.
It boots up in a few seconds from a SSD, it's always snappy. It worked fine on a core2duo and HDD 10 years ago, it works even better on an i5 and SSD now.