- my first time was probably with FVWM, it was a standard at that time;
- then I fell in love with Gnome 1.xx – fresh and elegant;
- changed it to KDE when Gnome became desktop environment for idiots;
- after years of development KDE authors finally managed to make me hate KDE for its bloatedness and bugs, so after some serious research I switched to Awesome, but not for long; looks like tiling isn’t in my nature and configuring with Lua wasn’t that pleasant either;
- petite OpenBox was love at first sight; unfortunately yesterday I’ve bumped against customisation limit and discovered that the project is dead;
- yesterday morning I chose Xmonad as the final solution: written in Haskell, configured in Haskell, extended in Haskell, but when I got a satisfactory configuration, the file looks more like an abstract acii-art;
- and the current one: Qtile; as a Pythonista I should choose it in the first place, but lack of its users on the Internet was somewhat suspicious; maybe they are simply introverted; as for now Qtile looks great; it’s described as a full-featured, hackable tiling window manager written and configured in Python.
UPDATE (2019-10-11):
- Qtile wasn’t that good as it seemed at the beginning, I dropped it pretty fast;
- then I tried bspwm, quite new, tiling WM – with this WM I was like a child in a fog; on one side it was very simple, on the other, possibilities was limitless (due to be 100% remote queried and controlled), and what’s more important, I had a feeling that WM is against me; also there were problems with some dialog and Java windows; this made me switch to i3 (very popular tiling WM) for a few months;
- i3 and later i3-gaps was a very good experience, super stable WM, but with raising appetite it started to limit me;
- then, being inspired by rices from /r/unixporn I tried a lot of stuff: spectrwm, 2bwm, Fluxbox, PekWM, Wingo – all of them revealed some kind of show stopper sooner than later;
- currently I’m using bspwm+sxhkd+polybar and I’m very, very happy with it; I had to get used to it a little bit to be then able to bend it to all my needs.