Multiple workspaces always made me kind of sloppy as a user when they were supposed to make me more organized. I would open up dozens of tabbed terminals and lose track of some of them. Eventually I spent enough time looking for windows I should have had right in front of me, and closing windows that shouldn’t be closed, that I figured there had to be a more productive way out there.
I’ve flirted with tiling window managers before. Ion, wmii and xmonad always left a bad taste in my mouth. They were inflexible and annoying and difficult to use with any workflow that wasn’t 100% centered around the terminal. God help you if a program needed to open a dialog window.
awesome is a lightweight tiling window manager with very good support for floating windows, without having to mess with separate layers for tiled or floating windows. It has full support for multiple displays through XRandR, it seems to be a lot faster than Xmonad and other tiling WMs, and it’s freaking tiny — the full source, including wallpapers, is just over 300k. It is very flexible with tagging and per-screen workspaces, support for extensive configuration options through Lua, and a great user community. It also has a number of really nice mouse-driven features, like resizing your layout by holding the meta key and right-dragging. A lot of tiling WMs drive me nuts because you have to memorize 45 keyboard shortcuts in order to use them effectively.
I’ve been a KDE user since 2002, with occasional flirtations with other desktop environments. awesome made me switch straight-out. At the moment, I’m running a pared-down Xfce setup, with xfwm4 swapped out for awesome. The other utilities, like the Xfce session manager and panel, are still useful. (The one thing that drives me nuts is that awesome takes over my systray. I would really like it in my Xfce panel.)
Give it a shot. It’s worth the learning curve.
Obligatory screenshot is forthcoming.