A Joy of Fluxbox
It’s been a while since I used Fluxbox WM. In \~2006-2008, it was my default environment for FreeBSD, Linux and Windows XP — for the last I used bb4win port of blackbox, a close relative of Fluxbox.
It turned out that Fluxbox is not a good choice for a laptop, which needs a lot of desktop environment (such as KDE, Gnome, Unity etc.) features that a simple WM cannot offer, like WiFi management, suspend/resume, dynamic displays additions and removals, multimedia buttons. I was too much a hassle to customize all of that.
So I moved on to KDE. Versions flew by: 3.5, 4.0, 4.1… There is KDE 5 now but I am yet to discover it.
But at work, I was stuck with KDE 3.5. It is a fine environment for my everyday work at a desktop machine - it has no fancy frills, but a lot is customizable (one thing that Gnome never got right). Still better than FVWM. Back at those times I built a Fluxbox from sources and used it for a while, but then abandoned for some reason, now forgotten.
As time goes by, I’ve been migrated to SLES11 which does not ship KDE3.5. Nobody supports KDE versions that old (yes, I know about KDE 3.5 forks, but it is not about them). For some reasons I had troubles starting KDE 4. Then I remembered about that Fluxbox installation. I looked up - and it was still there, and it still worked!
So now I am back with Fluxbox as my primary WM for work. It is ideal for working, as it has nothing fancy, nothing distracting, but has all feats I need from a WM - window placement, layers, taskbar, key bindings. The only trouble now is that Fluxbox ignores resolution changes initiated by xrandr - windows get messed up after that. But one can restart Fluxbox without closing currently running applications, in which case it organizes things correctly. I might script it to be done automatically.