windowmaker

“Try switching from gnome or kde which I believe both have gone into quite a bit of bloat to xfce, fluxbox, or windowmaker.”

Linux: Too Much of a Good Thing?

“I have Arch all nicely set up with pekwm and windowmaker as my desktops and xcompmgr for some fx and transparency.”

LinuxQuestions.org

“There is windowmaker but XFCE is much more usable.”

OSNews

“If, by this you mean something like workspaces (ie, virtual monitors between which you can flip with a keypress or key combo, rather than the need to drive three or four different actual monitors with different things going on simultaneously), then it is relatively easy, but note that it is a function of which GUI that you use; the most popular (kde, gnome) can both do this as can many of the more niche choices (xfce, enlightenment, windowmaker).”

LinuxQuestions.org