Usability
Tassilo Horn’s blog set me off.
http://xwinman.org/ is a useful guide to X window managers.
dwm is a dynamic window manager (screenshot) (IINM, “{dynamic,tiling} window managers” are the same thing.) Stumpwm, of course, is well-known.
[Update: As tiling window managers go, XMonad is definitely what you should use.]
The first part of this post, linked to from the ion wm manifesto, makes a distinction between usability (easy-to-use) and approachability (easy-to-learn). That in turn linked to the paper called “The Anti-Mac interface” [ACM]. I felt this was very well-written; it is something everyone should read.
There is a post called “Towards the Anti-Mac” which makes some points and claims that some Free Software is already moving in that direction. I didn’t read it very carefully, but it didn’t seem very convincing.
Offtopic: A post that says that “windows users are actually very very patient and willing to go through much work in order to get a particular application or peripheral to operate.”
Finally, a bunch of stuff that makes fun of Jakob Nielson. I didn’t know that he had made enough controversial statements to be made fun of, or even was famous enough.
(And from one of them, some Flash defenders.)
