Yeah sure you have Gnome, KDE, LXDE,and XFCE as the most famous and faboo, but what about MATE, IceWM, or Froxin? Personally I like the WM window managers like ICE and FN. It doesn't need to be shiny, just effective. I guess that's why I like puppy linux so much. It's not a tool to be constantly toyed with, it just gets it done. Since today I am going to work on Arch, I think I might use IceWM for it C:
I just use the default window manager for Xfce, which is called Xfwm. Nothing special about it, but I really like the fullscreen option for windows. I did at some point consider to just use a WM instead of a full desktop environment, but I decided I am too fond of having a full desktop environment. Great that you are trying out Arch. Keep in mind the wiki got answers for most questions, and usually some excellent guides on configuring stuff. I have used Arch long enough now that I should be able to help out if you run into issues.
I've pretty much sworn off DEs on my everyday Gentoo box after using Xmonad for a couple of years. Now, I can't work the way I want without the tiling WM. I never thought I would warm up to it at the start, but now it's just, well, ... perfect. I think everyone should give a tiling WM a test run and see how it fits. Performance-wise, it SCREAMS. And it's REALLY geeky, too.
In bodhi linux (this might be interesting for you Thunder if you haven't fiddled with bodhi) the desktop environment acts like a window manager. If you have tried e17 (or enlightenment as people deem it) you have many options as to how you want it to act. On all my bodhi installs I choose tiling because I don't want the bullshit of dealing with windows on top of windows. At most I'll have abiword, a terminal, and firefox open. e17 will take each of the windows and format them according to importance. Abiword and Terminator will be about the same size, and firefox gets the other half of the screen with the item bar on the side. I do still like DE's, but tiling DE's are effective and shabang done all at the same time. I still have yet to try MATE as a desktop environment and Hybryde will be awesome for that. Go check out Hybryde if you haven't yet.
My Xmonad setup has 9 'workspaces'. I can switch between them with a simple alt-1, alt-2, etc, so I can actually run 9 apps in full screen, and no searching for them. Each WS tiles, of course, as well, so if I want to pen something else in the WS I'm in, I just start it up and it tiles into place. If I decide I want to send it to another workspace, I can with another simple keystroke, or I can float it on top with the other app under it. All in a moment with keystrokes. When I login, Xmonad starts up the apps I normally need, and automatically assigns them to the correct WS, as well. This way, I don't have to start up my normal apps one at a time. It took me about a month to get everything the way I wanted it, but I'm a haskell novice. If I knew haskell better then, I could have done it in a day. I have gotten so comfortable with the many things I can do with keystrokes that I just don't like DEs anymore. BTW: yes, I've seen Bohdi.
The zoom feature of Compiz is really nice, and I have often considered setting up Compiz on my system, so I can switch to it when playing older games in a small window.
I picked up on awesomewm the other day. Holy shnit man. If I could use compiz with it that would be awesome....r
Honestly, I really like Openbox. I can run any game with superlow processing desktop environment... almost like "safe mode" I don't have any custom menu's or anything, just use terminal to launch programs or nemo/nautilus. Some day I will investigate how to create some better menu's For the most part I don't use it on a regular basis, but it sure helps my distro run a bit faster.
