For all intents and purposes I don't have a desktop. It's just a wallpaper and canvas for the actual workflow. The app drawer is one keypress away, as is the terminal (and I prefer to have separate sessions for different tasks anyway). I usually see my desktop for about five seconds after bootup per day so there's not much reason to put anything else there. Think of it like the wallpaper or black background of a tiling window manager. I really don't get how this is such a crazy idea to some people. I've subconsciously used the exact same workflow since before Gnome even implemented it, just without explicit support from my desktop environment.