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

• https://pastebin.com/Xyn0mEjr

• https://wiki.debian.org/Wmii

• https://wiki.parabola.nu/Wmii

Herbstluftwm

• https://github.com/procrastonos/herbstluft/blob/master/autostart

• https://gist.github.com/asciimoo/1539803/0694aa69aaec3fe7af5b19e211bb318e478d6196

• https://gist.github.com/meskarune/3849471

• http://blog.binchen.org/posts/my-herbstluftwm-configuration.html

• https://www.reddit.com/r/herbstluftwm/comments/29noeh/greybeard_theme/

• http://thedarnedestthing.com/herbstluftwm%20workflow

• http://thedarnedestthing.com/herbstluftwm

• http://thedarnedestthing.com/bspwm%20framed#conky-padding