Since this is running into personal DE history quite a bit, I guess it's time I probably shared mine too.
The fact is that I am quite a newbie to *nix world, just over 2 years in. After pecking around for over 3 year in Windows trying to make sense of the Win32 API and the general scheme of things, IDecidedToMoveOn. As most noobs do, I started out with Ubuntu with help from a book on Linux programming, some time in late 2013.
So, my first WM was technically compiz. I got CCSM soon after and tinkered with it for just a week. Then I heard about Mint and jumped over, and got used to the Mate desktop. In just under two weeks, I left it too.
My next crack at a distro was Xubuntu. For some reason, Xfce came very naturally to me. I kept using Xfce 4.10/4.12 in some distro or the other for atleast 9 months before I decided to completely dump Windows and all Windows API programming to do all my serious stuff on Linux.
So, I began scrounging forums for minimal setups and tiling WM's and landed on i3. But, as I was about to install it on my Debian Jessie setup, I saw a thread on LQ about dwm and suckless.org and finally settled on it. It was a little hard to set up at first, I must admit. Now, I am very happily learning web programming and C++ (my early bkgnd. was only in C) and getting ready to learn Debian administration, although I am only involved in localization at the moment.
Anyway, as newbie I like Debian a lot. The GNU/Linux environment, in spite of it's recent developments, still feels a lot better than Windows. I still remember how I used to screw Windows Explorer with custom shell namespaces and add my Application Desktop Toolbars to make it look at least a little appeasing. I literally revelled at the freedom I found when I started with Debian. dwm, stterm, tmux, vim and nano are software I use regularly and I couldn't feel any better when using any other setup. Currently on Debian Jessie with Xfce for my day-to-day stuff and dwm+stterm with occasional tmux for programming.