Totally agree.
I used to love KDE, then they messed it up with KDE 4. Moved to Ubuntu / Gnome. Then Ubuntu screwed it up when they made it all Unity based. Screw that, I was happy working the way I was without to much shiny. Now using XFCE, and its refreshingly simple.
Fan of i3 as well. People talk about tmux and I just shrug; it's built in!
Tmux is built in to i3?
He prefers a tiling windows manager at the application level rather than within tmux.
People make a big deal out of tmux's split screens, but my workflow is much more flexible with xmonad and GNU screen (with the caveat that it requires more upfront).
love me some i3 :)
roughly the same here. I've always been a fan of XFCE, but preferred KDE until KDE4. And I just re-installed KDE 3 days ago, still don't like it.
I switched over to XFCE for a while, until finally settling on i3. I'm perfectly happy with i3, and even if KDE pulled their heads out of their butts, I doubt I would go back.
This allows developers to experiment with different paradigms with regards to the GUI, see for example the popularity of tiling WMs on Linux. (i3 has my preference, others swear by xmonad).
I know it is possible to change window managers for Windows and OSX as well but the experience is just not the same.