Desktop linux is pretty good these days, though I do like a tiling manager for getting things done sometimes. Less easy to use for stuff like wifi setup and the like (so I'll usually stay in GNOME/KDE/whatever for that), but great for juggling lots of windows.
Stuff I haven't tried:
- ion
- xmonad
- dwm
- i3 (I'd try it next I reckon)
What I have tried:
- wmii
- herbstluftwm
So for the stuff that I have tried, I generally like them well enough. My preference is for wmii because it has a natural mouse-driven way of resizing the tiles. Unless I'm mistaken, herbst offers only keyboard-driven changes, which is really frikken tedious and I hate it. Herbst also has the idea of tiles and subtiles, and that just keeps tripping me up and I don't want it (and it seems non-trivial to workaround).
Configuration
Because these are fairly minimal window managers, the config is generally done via a config file rather than a series of control panels. This is nice because you can stuff the config in a git repo, but it raises the learning curve a bit.
In any case there are many examples to crib from if you're starting from scratch, and there's usually a default config file for you to start with and hack on.
wmii