Choose among a wide range of cool desktops. These are not "skins" or mods like in Windows. These are entirely different desktop systems that each have their unique characteristics.
What this means is that you can choose a desktop that does a lot of work for you ... like my main home computer, which is fairly tricked out. I've got drawers that contain icons to avoid clutter on a task bar, I've got a taskbar on the top and a task panel on the bottom, the weather and a box to put words to look up in a dictionary, and other cool stuff is on the task bar.
I've got a second installation in a computer that has only a limited number of purposes, and does not need anything fancy on the desktop, so I use a very low demand, very functional desktop that leaves lots of memory available for my applications.
In Windows, you get what they give you, it is resource-hungry, and if you want to change it you have to add more. There is no slimmed down version of the windows system.
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FVWM for the win!
It's what I used back in 1995. After playing around with gnome for a few years, I'm back to it. I like it better than anything else I've mucked with.
The problem, of course, is if you want to mix and match applications that use the respective toolkits of the major desktop environments. I've used gnome for quite awhile, but there are still "just that one" KDE app that leads to a mass of support libraries being loaded. It's not just GTK or QT anymore.
Anyway, being able to tune your system for a particular task is a good point for Linux/BSD indeed.
Hank: I would venture to guess that the totality of the libraries you would need to run to operate a KDE app in a gnome environment is still less in bulk (memory demand, etc.) and problems than running your average windows app normally. This is just a guess, of course. I have not done this in about a year, and I suppose it is possible that things have changed that much since then, given the rapid development in some areas.
Also, in Linux, the support software for a particular app is generally unloaded when it is not used. That would be normal for any particular system, except of course Windows which requires turning off the computer, wiping the hard drive, reinstalling the system, then installing several service releases, all while swinging a dead chicken around over your head at just the right number of rotations per minute, to get the memory back.