Mint. With XFCE on my netbook and with Cinnamon on my desktop.

Mint 17.1

I'm using Mint 17 with Xfce. I'd rather prefer the Debian Edition, but for gaming purposes I use the Ubuntu based version. Also I use Debian Stable with LXDE (I was using Gnome but changed recently) for university stuff. I'd like to try Arch for learning purposes when I have time.

Another vote for Mint. I use Linux as a backup more or less but Mints pretty useful right out of the box.

Mint 17 Cinnamon! It seems its pretty popular and it does have good uses right out of the box as mentioned.
Its very user friendly and is very comfortable for people who are out of options since being booted from
Windows XP Haha.
Even so, I still have trouble with some simple commands and such and installs and such suck.

Debian 7.0 (stable) with XFCE

OS: Puppy Linux - Lucid 528
window manager: either Openbox or JWM

I boot from an external hard drive connected via USB 2 using a frugal install of Puppy Linux.

Well, for me, it's more akin to staying on top of what I need to know to be a good full stack web dev.

It's always about learning what I need to learn the most at a given moment, because there is always a queue of stuff I ought learn (and it does make my life easier once I've learned it and it's all very interesting, but the volume of stuff to process before getting remotely close to paradise is mind bogging) and diving far into Linux internals never makes it remotely close to top of the list.

In an ideal world, it's something I'd like to do, but the crazy cutting edge world moving at the speed of light we live in, it's something I can't justify doing with my time.

if i dabble its MintLinux.....

It's interesting how many people actually seem to use the.. more default distros, I expected more Arch and other less 'mainstream' distros.
Is the window manager very influential resource-wise on modern systems?

Fedora 20 KDE 64bit
Mageia 4 XFCE 32bit

I think the window manager is less of a "deal breaker" on modern systems. I never noticed much of a difference in performance between XFCE, Gnome, KDE, or openbox. In terms of system resources, the only pace I ever really noticed a difference was in the Conky information.

My preference for openbox is more about customizability than system resources.

That's good to know, could you point something you've customized?
I'm assuming it's a bit too much for someone like me that doesn't know too much about Linux.

Kubuntu, and experimenting with the i3 window manager.