[yellowapple]

I've lately been a fan of Haiku's (and BeOS') default approach of putting taskbar functionality in the (top-right) corner, without taking up the entire edge (unless you've somehow got enough distinct windowed programs running to necessitate that. Achieves most of the same paradigm; the only thing missing is the window control button placement, but the tabbed windows are a worthwhile tradeoff.

I still prefer tiled windows (particularly herbstluftwm and PaperWM), but as far as floating window setups go it feels about as well-designed as it gets.