>My desktop shortcuts are in one stack on the left. All windows on that monitor are positioned to the right of that stack, so no need to minimize or close anything.
So you're permanently wasting part of the most limited asset on your machine (the pixels on your monitor) just so you can use a lame technology? :)
Icons were perhaps good on machines with 1M RAM and FAT12 filesystem - when you couldn't have that much stuff loaded, so many apps installed, so many files in your documents. With just 200 files in a folder, icons become unusable and actually begin hiding the content they were supposed to make easier to spot.
Pretty much like a combo - up to 30 it's manageable by eye-mouse coordination. Beyond that, not.