User experience
Are they drastically different or disastrously so?
Agraphical user environment is more than just wallpaper and application menu. If you ever wanted to test the authenticity of such a claim, try using one of the projects featured in this month’s Roundup. Window managers are a component of all the popular desktop environments. KDE has Kwin, Gnome3 has Mutter, XFCE has xfwm, LXDE has Openbox… we could go on. All these window managers, and their parent desktop environments have a common work flow, which makes comparisons easier.
Not so with our choice of window managers. For one, we have a selection spanning all the different types, such as tiling, stacking and compositing. Furthermore, some window managers are easier to work with thanks to their wealth of documentation while others boast of having useful applications.