4.) Xmonad
New and modern desktop managers like GNOME 3 or KDE4 come all dressed up and full of eye candy. They look nice but not everything is in the appearance. In my opinion it’s more important what is under the hood then how the hood looks like. But not everything is lost.
Some interfaces are not following this trend. They are known as window managers. Window managers are divided in two main groups, floating window managers and tiling window managers. When speaking from point of productivity boosting, tiling window managers caught my interest. One of most popular tiling managers is Xmonad.
Xmonad is an tiling window manager written in Haskell and it was introduced in 2007 as DWM fork. Well, at first Xmonad was just DWM rewritten from C into Haskell but today Xmonad comes with features unavailable for DWM without patching and some are Xmonad specific features.