[on tmux] “ C-b d will “detach” the client, basically suspending all your work to disk.” This is misleading, that’s not what detach does. Nothing gets “suspended”, things continue running in the background.
Also, nothing gets written to disk, and there is no possibility to keep tmux sessions across reboots. A great resource about tmux was posted here some days ago: https://leanpub.com/the-tao-of-tmux/read
What you're doing really mimics my usual OpenBSD set up. cwm, xterm, tmux. A lot of operating systems say they come fully usable, but none of them do as well as OpenBSD does. Everything works out of the box, and is a great solution.
I love the casual simplicity of OpenBSD, and the well-written man pages, which often include an EXAMPLES section that gives you a heads up on how to use a program (or configuration) and how different flags might interact.