I used fvwm2 for a long time because it's very very configurable and it did all I needed. I mainly care about the core of the application an I am not worried about how the GUI looks. BTW, I start most programs using key bindings. I always used the i386 architecture. Recently I started also working on Alpha too.
Alpha seems superior as design.
SMP issues are addressed carefully on Alpha for example. I wrote from scratch a little operative system called TinaOS running on a MIPS emulator. It was for the Operative System exam. It tooks 3 months of work to make it working fine. Not very often recently, but it happened many times in the past.