I just removed KDE and GNOME from my Linux machine again, because it didn't "feel" comfortable.
A while ago, I was introduced to tiling window managers and
ion3 was the window manager of my choice, because it was not to hard to learn(if you're used to using screen) and not too hard to customize and it had support for floating windows(for applications like The Gimp and similar) and it had a cool thing called the "scratchpad", a workspace which could be made visible and invisible on demand, an ideal place for things like media players and a spare shell.
But then, the author of ion3 went berzerk on many Linux package maintainers, trying to force them to ALWAYS use the latest snapshot of the source code which was hard to fulfill for distributions like Debian which have a long release cycle and put a lot of effort into creating a nice mixture of current features and proven versions of programs.
So I went back to GNOME and then to KDE, because I couldn't get packages for ion3 anymore.. Now, a couple of months later, I missed the advantages of a tiled desktop and went out to try a few other window managers.
I tried the X11 equivalent of screen,
ratpoison, for some time, but always got confused with the actual screen sessions I was using, then I tried
wmii, but for some reason, I did not feel comfortable with it and at last, I felt like I had to learn Haskell, because
XMonad's configuration is done by extending the XMonad programm and compiling the whole thing into an executable and run it.
But none of the above felt quite right and for a while, I hesitated trying a window manager called "
awesome", but I can't say that the title is too bold, because it really IS awesome.. in a way. It features several tiled layouts, a floating layout and a fullscreen-only mode, it has vi-like keyboard shortcuts, some things can still be used with a mouse and the statusbar can be filled with several types of widgets(eg. text, graphics, bar graphs) which in turn can come to life by a simple shellscript.
So there's not much to learn to start using awesome(apart from the strange feeling of a tiled desktop for first time users) in all its power and the decision was made rather quickly. Now I have several hundreds of megabytes more free space on my harddisk and a desktop environment even better than my old ion desktop
And it all looks like this:
