I've pretty much given up on Linux desktop environments in favor of tiling window managers. First I tried XMonad and then, when I had an issue with my monitor

I've pretty much given up on Linux desktop environments in favor of tiling window managers. First I tried XMonad and then, when I had an issue with my monitor layout that was causing XMonad to crash (X reporting my monitor size as 0x0 for some reason). I jumped to StumpWM and have been using it ever since (it had the same problem, but I found it much easier to locate and fix the bug in a Common Lisp program than in a Haskell program: especially because I could connect to the running window manager with Slime in emacs, catch the error, and then fiddle around in the REPL for a while to find the X calls that could actually return the right monitor size).