Eh, I disagree. WMaker+Luakit makes my netbook work. Anything else under i686 it's a no-no.

I had the opposite experience with dwm. I don't like cycling through overlapping windows on the same "desktop", and I don't like taking the time to place windows correctly. With 2 screens, I have 18 "desktops", which is more than enough, and the automatic tiling is exactly what I want. On the other hand when I use GNOME/KDE/Windows I'm always losing lots of time navigating. Also I must have some kind of curse because even with high-end computers I've never had one of those run really smoothly. My current work laptop is on KDE, and when I use a shortcut to open a terminal it takes 200/300ms.

I think it also helps that I've never really tinkered with it. I took someone's build that had a few things I wanted, and I think that's it. In contrast, I spend more time on a regular desktop environment setting up shortcuts.