I've tried quite a few window managers but I must say the automatic tiling wm actually make me prefer gnome, what really seems to do well with me is ratpoison or stumpwm. The control of tiling seems to work great and both are quite customizable (especially stumpwm). (I use C-, for my prefix and C-t in tmux) Recently I just use gnome though because my laptop just works there and have a full screen web browser and a full screen tmux (so I at least have some tiling).