I’ve used herbstluftwm on my main desktop for years. Love it. Manual tiling works well for me. Totally flexible and customizable. Switch between floating and tiling with a keypress, etc.
And then on various other machines.
- Xfce on my desktop at work that I don’t use that much (work mainly from home) and just needed to set up quick. It’s totally fine, like xfce always is.
- Gnome on my tablet (basically a Surface knock-off). I don’t really like gnome, but it’s the only thing I’ve tried that works well OOTB for a touchscreen.
- PekWM on an old macbook running debian. Great stacking WM. Super flexible, and the tabbed windows for any app are cool.
- LXQT on an ancient (2009?) dual-core laptop that I mainly just use for writing in nvim. Works well for a simple setup.
I work for a large state university and run linux on my office machine, despite the fact the IT office dept doesn’t officially support it. I told our IT guy once what I’m doing and his response was, “cool.” Of course I’m totally on my own if anything goes wrong. It helps that I’m a prof and most of my on-campus work doesn’t involve much time on a computer, aside from basic web and documents stuff. tldr, in my case I’m able to just do it without asking anyone’s permission, and it’s worked out great for several years now, but a lot of jobs aren’t like that obviously.