IceWM is quite nice; I am currently using it. Personally I actually preferred fluxbox, but fluxbox kind of died some years ago. It is not 100% dead, as there is still activity on github every now and then, but largely if you know it, you also know that you had a rather sizeable community about it back in the days, and now that is ... gone.

IceWM is in many ways actually more sophisticated than fluxbox; unfortunately on the other hand, IceWM has a few annoyances that I reported, and ... all of these got ignored. Now I understand the problem domain, the lead dev lacks time - fair enough. But it also means that I no longer file issues about features, since they'll just be ignored. Bug reports I may still do, but it kind of is no longer so useful since I have the impression that the lead dev will mostly not care that much.

KDE and GNOME I can not use for various reasons, but also one reason is speed-use. Fluxbox was sooooo snappy compared to KDE and I also dislike the trend of making KDE worse ever since Nate was put in charge (the guy who added a donation-daemon; see a complaint about Nate and him tying his own personal business into KDE as an ad-platform for it, from 2025: https://web.archive.org/web/20250914213714/https://jriddell....).

I had a look at some other WMs, such as awesome WM and so forth. They are all somewhat ok-ish, but always worse than fluxbox. Next step would be some tiling WM but for some reason I found them annoying, requiring my brain to think more. WMs also seem to be significantly less popular these days; there was more variety in the past here. Also, wayland kind of changed the situation a bit, though I can not say if wayland itself reduced variety - not a whole lot of software available on wayland either, I was surprised about that when I tested it some months again. Consider they constantly promote wayland as the successor to xorg, it is in some ways like a dumbed-down path, with fewer features. Very strange. Then you have also the GTK devs who will transition into a wayland-only future for GTK5; that was also one reason why I stopped writing any more ruby-gtk code, since I would here help transition to a wayland-only way and I don't want to abandon xorg merely because the GTK devs have received their corporate order to do so (thankfully https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver exists but it needs a lot more polishing and ideally more developers, but that seems also super-hard, since it requires domain-knowledge, time ... people lack that naturally in the open source world, and the AI slop also seems to have further reduced the number of open source devs in general. Claude is now our uberlord here, see the ruby programming language, where claude writes most of the code now).