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It's really hard to separate the potential for a midlife crisis, wistful nostalgia for my youth and pragmatism.
I have a variety of Unix-y systems running, almost exclusively using Mwm (the Motif window manager). Having been an i3 user for a long time, the way that I mainly use my Unix environments has changed a lot and I need the tiling aspects a lot less, while the keyboard driven parts are an inconvenience and not a boon.
I mostly use Linux via VNC sessions from my Windows, Mac or ChromeOS (also a Linux) machines. In basically every environment, passing the `meta` key through is hit or miss. As my client screen sizes vary, having every window default to full-screen isn't very helpful either.
(I will probably blog about this set up on my real blog -- I even use a loopback VNC server with Windows Subsystem for Linux and it works really well.)
Finally, as I've really leaned into `tmux` in the last year, including a reasonably nice tmux config which integrates with my vim window switching, I don't need to launch a lot of terminals and have my window manager stack them.
My dotfiles on GitHub, including vim and tmux
Of course, there's an element of retrocomputing with using Mwm. It's very very similar to the fvwm I used when I was a teenager. It's also the actual window manager I used on my DECstation when I got my first "real" Unix machine. (This was back when Linux was not considered a Unix -- something which is still technically true from the point of view of the family tree, but that I don't think people commonly care about like they did in the 90's).
Maybe a key observation is that there's not a lot of gap between retrocomputing (using older software, which was by necessity lighter) and the hipster-ish-but-in-a-good-way movement of writing small, tightly focussed software, like i3, aerc and the suckless tools.