If you look around the forums, you'll found lots of threads about window managers, though many are old by now. For example, fluxbox vs openbox (both pretty similar), dwm, a tiling window manager (every window you open automatically divides the screen space), and so on. I'll spam wit some of my pages, all of which are dated but still accurate.
https://srobb.net/fluxbox.html
https://srobb.net/fluxopen.html (Comparing some aspects of fluxbox and openbox)
https://srobb.net/dwm.html (About the dwm tiling manager The best thing about the page is a link to a wonderful guide to configuring that was posted years ago on the Debian forums).
Note that things like Mate, Gnome, KDE, XFCE4, and similar are desktop environments, not window managers. This means that they will have builtin tools to configure things like printers and scanners, automounting, say, a plugged in phone, and so on. Window managers don't, you have to configure them manually.
VERY generally speaking, those who prefer window maangers like the minimalism. On most hardware that is less than 15 years old, the resources saved won't be that noticeable, but on the other hand, window managers tend to get in your way less than desktop environments. (In my opinion--as has been said, this is REALLY personal choice).
There is the cwm window manager, which has some nice builtin keyboard shortcuts for opening windows and moving things around. Most window managers have reasonable builtin keyboard shortcuts that are more or less easily customized.
Hope this helps, but it probably just adds to the confusion.
The ArchLinux forums have threads about most of the window managers, which might be useful. Their wiki tends to have some of the better guides about using various window managers, though quality varies.