I sort of miss when my way of using GUI desktops involved the wallpaper sometimes being visible. These days It’s all quarter/half/full windows that rarely close, and certainly are never minimized.

I don't think i ever have something fully maximized (aside from games, though even then sometimes i play in windowed mode). Even when i do maximize a window (which isn't often but some programs like Krita work better like that), the dock and miniwindows (i'm using Window Maker as my window manager) still take their own space and the background shows through. Also i often have a bunch of terminal windows minimized, then i forget about them and open new ones until at some point i go and garbage collect them :-P

Also, windows are not multiple. Each draw.io wants to be big rectangle because it is web garbage. Each chat program, unlike what Psi and QIP were

macOS is still somewhat like this, if you avoid the "full screen" maximize just double clicking the titlebar will only grow the window to fit the content rather than have the window to fill the screen.

Its a lot like papers on a desk, and I know tons of folks here don't care for that model but I quite like it, especially in conjunction with stage manager.

We had a lot more TUIs and transparent terms / libs with transparency. Things like Xchat, etc.