Window Maker is a window manager that, while having elements of a desktop environment, does keep very strongly to the principles of a basic, light weight window manager. It has an extremely simple, mouse driven interface and in some ways operates in the old NextStep blueprint of functionality.

This Ubuntu application adds actions to the corners of the screen in GNOME, such as switching virtual desktops and controlling the volume. You can even enable the screensaver and control the screen brightness on your laptop.

Don't have a graphics card capable of running desktop effects with Compiz on Ubuntu? By enabling compositing in GNOME's default Metacity window manager, you get some eye candy and can run applications that require or benefit from a compositing window manager.

In GNOME 2.22, included in Ubuntu 8.04, the default Metacity window manager has compositing built in. This means that you can get your eye candy effects without switching window managers!

Enlightenment, also known simply as E, is a stacking window manager for the X Window System which can be used alone or in conjunction with a desktop environment such as GNOME or KDE.

Although I regularly use KDE, Xfce, and other desktops for GNU/Linux, I keep returning to GNOME. Sometimes I use the default Metacity window manager, and other times the quicker Sawfish, but, with either choice, GNOME has an uncluttered look that allows me to focus on my work rather than my software.

JWM (Joe's Window Manager) is a very lightweight window manager for use with X windows under Linux or Unix. My compiled version weighs in at 138KBytes in size, not the dozens of megabytes like KDE or GNOME. If you are looking for a simple kiosk system interface or a lightweight desktop for a dedicated server, then JWM should fit the bill nicely.

GNOME Shell is a window manager designed specifically for the upcoming GNOME 3 desktop, with the intention of offering a rather different way of interacting with the desktop, providing a workspace which hardly resembles the classic desktops.

In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more popular approach of coordinate-based stacking of overlapping objects (windows) that tries to fully emulate the desktop metaphor.