In the 90's even hackers loved some bling-bling. Maybe not with E16, but some WMaker with a nice backdrop and a transparent UXTerm was really nice and much faster than the emerging KDE in late 90's.
Also, heck, it was cool and pretty having some city at night while you were day and night with URxvt with links or lynx on it reading media and posting to fora.
Yup. Circa 1997, I switched from AfterStep to (then-new) Enlightenment briefly before settling on WindowMaker as a good balance between bling and performance.
My PC at the time was a hand-me-down white box AMD 386 (40 MHz) running FreeBSD 2.x.
Also, heck, it was cool and pretty having some city at night while you were day and night with URxvt with links or lynx on it reading media and posting to fora.