I am mostly a windows user these days, but fifteen years ago I ran Linux as my main OS.
I ran Ubuntu on a Dell Latitude E5400, at first I ran Gnome 2 or KDE 4 as my DE, but got annoyed with how much vertical space they used, so I learned how to use Fluxbox.
Fluxbox is great, a small stacking WM, that is easy to configure and worked like I wanted it.
I still set it up to run gnome-settings-daemon as I had no idea on how to do apply a GTK theme without it.
The really annoying part of running fluxbox as a WM was that I never figured out how to shut down the computer from a menu, it allways complained about me not having permissions to shut down the computer, so I used to do a log off and before the GDM login screen loaded I could press the power button on the laptop and have it shutdown the computer gracefully, timing was key, but it worked.