My very first WM was Blackbox, back in 2000, and I imprinted on it like a baby duck, so today I still mostly use Fluxbox. It’s abandoned and unmaintained, but still works (for now). It’s very minimalist and lightweight. When it finally dies completely I guess I’ll finally learn how to use a tiling WM.
(I use Gnome on a laptop with a HiDPI screen, because that was too annoying to configure correctly on Fluxbox. It’s… fine. I added a bunch of customisations and it mostly stays out of my way, which is what I want in an environment.)
No matter what WM/DE I use, I always add a dropdown / “quakelike” terminal application – I previously used Yakuake, but switched to Guake. It uses a hotkey to show / hide a terminal (and you can use multiple tabs, and multiplexers inside the tabs). I can’t live without this, and I highly recommend it if you often find yourself hunting around for your terminal window.