I tried awesome, and was somewhat disapointed by a community that felt 'dead'. Searching google for answers to questions I had often yielded old, out-of-date answers not relevant to the current version. I did however appreciate the ease of configuring it with Lua.

If I feel like trying a tiling wm again, I think I'd go with xmonad. From reading, it seems to have decent defaults, and it'd a good opportunity to start playing with Haskell.

I wish integrating tiling wm's with regular DE's, even lightweight ones (lxde, xfce) would be more popular. When switching all out to awesome, I missed the conveniences like a tray with wifi and sound volume. I just want a DE, with tiling windows!

If you're running Ubuntu then if you

  apt-get install xmonad gnome-panel

a GNOME with Xmonad option will appear in your login screen. Then you have to create an xmonad configuration that works with GNOME like so

  import XMonad
  import XMonad.Config.Gnome

  main = do
      xmonad $ gnomeConfig

in .xmonad/xmonad.hs and everything will work.

Mind = blown. That's awesome, I'll have to give this a try. I used to run XMonad on Arch, but then I switched to Ubuntu a couple of years back and got with the Unity program. But if I can have the best of both worlds, I'm sold. The icing on the cake would be if a drop-down terminal like Tilda still works with this hybrid setup as well.

I've been using xmonad for ... well, guess it's been the past 3 years now. Never had to change the config or adapt to API changes as I had with LUA and things just work. Plus, it's quite performant (although it has some input-looping related quirks sometimes) and hardly takes up any memory. Can only recommend it to people new to the tiling wm scene.

I used Enlightenment 16 in Gnome 2 for years, but Gnome 3 seems to take more of an everything-or-nothing approach. These days I'm using Xmonad standalone, plus Xmobar as a kind of pipe-driven, text-only notification area. If I ever need a system tray, I run trayer (and curse whoever designed the program that requires it!).

There [0], how to use xMonad with xfce, I followed the instructions and it worked fine. I didn't have any problem to roll back either.

https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Xmonad/Using_xmonad_in_X...

What about Amethyst didn't fit your requirements? I know it's still buggy, I'm just curious if there's any specific ones or if it's just generally not useful to you.

Try spectacle. It's pretty simple and straightforward. You cannot do advanced layouts, but splitting the screen in halfs both vertically and horizontally with the keyboard makes Mac OS X much more bearable.

I tried several for OS X and landed on using Moom [0].

The layout snapshots is really handy to jumpstart the day and put everything in place. Keyboard shortcuts allow resizing and moving windows around. It's highly configurable, so you can add or remove features as you see fit. I'd give the free trial a spin.

[0] http://manytricks.com/moom/