If you put your mind to it a bit, you can approximate this on Linux today. There's a lot of options other than Gnome and KDE, and the XWindows ecosystem may be a bit "out of date" but it's extremely mature and very, very pluggable.
And the result is indeed pretty blazing fast. I tend to run pretty close to this now; my world is basically a tiling WM, some shells, and a browser.
The biggest compromise overall is that browser. They just keep getting bigger and bigger, and I need it to work. Props to the people writing them who are doing an amazing job making them faster, but, well, as the saying goes "if the hardware doubles its speed, software will become three times slower" must now apply even harder to the browser, which just keeps becoming a more and more amazingly performant platform for serving pages with tens of megabytes of JS and dozens of layered video ads playing.
And the result is indeed pretty blazing fast. I tend to run pretty close to this now; my world is basically a tiling WM, some shells, and a browser.
The biggest compromise overall is that browser. They just keep getting bigger and bigger, and I need it to work. Props to the people writing them who are doing an amazing job making them faster, but, well, as the saying goes "if the hardware doubles its speed, software will become three times slower" must now apply even harder to the browser, which just keeps becoming a more and more amazingly performant platform for serving pages with tens of megabytes of JS and dozens of layered video ads playing.