(None of the following may sound especially vital to some folks but these just illustrate a general configurability that applies to most everything.)

For some examples, it has a very precise focusing model - I can focus on mouse hover and raise on click but not raise on drag-to-copy clicks. It has a very precise window placement model that I can't replicate anywhere else - e.g., the openbox guys in #openbox acknowledged openbox couldn't do it and that one of their goals was to improve there, where it does a smart placement called 'MinOverlapPercentPlacement' as one of many possibilities. It can do remarkable things with functions and positioning things down to the pixel, such as

The '-1p' in the arithmetic expansion puts a raised window 1 pixel above the bottom center of my display and snaps the mouse to the bottom right corner if it wasn't already in the window area. (Don't worry - this sort of thing is rarely necessary if you don't want to be bothered with this sort of precision.)

For even more over-the-top things, I can position how far to the left or right from the parent menu a child menu opens. I can set the text and color and size of tooltips in the pager if there are any tooltips at all. You can choose if you want an 'alt-tab' sort of menu but can pick which button to bind it to, pick which apps are shown, pick what data is displayed with them (such as geometry and desk), and define a max width to the whole menu/widget. Etc. It's just very nearly infinitely configurable.

Also, some people go way out with using its ability to read arbitrary scripts or use arbitrary programs (Read, PipeRead configuration commands, etc.) to create pseudo-real-time thumbnails for their desktop (I use no desktop icons at all on my primary config) and create menus containing weather reports (sort of like conky-in-a-menu) and so on. The possibilities are nearly endless.

-- Oh, and I forgot to mention that you can use m4 or cpp as a preprocessor to your configuration, creating a sort of conditional compilation of your config. So, for instance, you could use the same config to create two very different configs based on whether you were on your desktop or your laptop or whatever.

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Thanks slakmagik, that sounds quite interesting. I can see I'm gonna have to go have a play with it. I guess I just discounted it based on its initial ugliness.

I've been using windowmaker pretty much exclusively for the best part of 10 years until only recently when I got seduced by the "oh so shiny kde4 desktop".

Do you have a screenshot of your fvwm set up slakmagik? That sounds intriguing.

I use XFCE (thanks robbie for 4.6.2) and am very happy with it.

I've just been researching it. It actually looks like you can make it do wonders. Some screenshots/themes on the fvwm official site if you google for it. Just a shame they don't provide a better default setup. It really does it a disservice IMO.

I decided to give KDE some more time, to see if it grew on me, and it never did. I prefer the programs and overall feel of GNOME. Xfce is second, for me. Using FreeBSD and building everything from ports, I settled on Xfce and then GNOME programs to go with it. I like GNOME and Xfce the most, I'm using GNOME right now (Ubuntu), I've been thinking about using GNOME with even FreeBSD, even though it takes a long time to build, and I can't vote twice, so I voted for GNOME.

Fluxbox, forever!

xfce because it suits my needs, but i would like to try the awesome wm

I'm back on trusty old Windowmaker where I belong!

Had one of those pivotal moments that make you just sigh and go "Sod this for a game of soldiers!"

Sitting at an idle kde4 desktop was using over 700MB RAM, and around 500 of that appeared to be in use by various akonadi processes!

I've tried KDE a couple of time on different machines but it always seems too sluggish so I always end up using Gnome

Amazed how few Gnome responses. KDE myself, can't STAND how ugly gnome is, and I've never been able to make it look less ugly myself.

Fluxbox.

Fluxbox, always, now with tint2 goodness

Haha thats exactly the thing that caused me to move from kde to xfce.

Well, my regular config just looks like evilwm. There are many screenshots around the net of really eye-candy-ish fvwm configs which look great to a lot of people.

Recently I've switched from fluxbox to xmonad, very satisfactory.