I'm back to using a tiling vm again. I've used KDE Plasma for quite a while, but after browsing r/unixporn for a bit too much I could no longer contain the desire for ricing. So I logged back into my i3-gaps vm and got to work. Well, it wasn't exactly i3, it was actually both Plasma and i3. I had previously changed KDE's vm from kwin to i3, and had both Plasma and Plasma with i3. And let me tell you, Plasma with i3 is the perfect combination of DE and VM. You get the convenience of a DE with the speed of a VM. It's sooo sweet.
I decided to go for a nord theme (cheesy, I know). The whole process was actually really convenient. Slap on a nice cold, blue wallpaper with nitrogen, find preconfigured .Xresources colorthemes for URxvt and a colorscheme for vim. A theme change in the browser (Vivaldi) and in Plasma took care of the rest. A complete, beautiful system in less than an hour. There are some minor things left, like a nice music visualizer (recommendations welcome) and a fetch program (recommendations also welcome) but other than that I'm really hapoy with the outcome.
Writing this from my phone at work, but might post screenshots when I get home, if there is any interest in them.
I was an i3 man for a few years, and then switched to slime for that authentic lispiness.
Then I switched to awesome because I wanted to give Lua a try, but this time I ignored all the tiling layouts. I just want predictable windows, even if they overlap.
So I have a few bindings relating to inching a window up/down/left/right and resizing too, as well as some "snap here" and "maximise this dimension" bindings - and it works great!
Floating window managers are highly underrated
I used to use i3 on my personal laptop, but my use cases for my laptop have dropped substantially after the A key stopped working (and I'm not keen on writing Gedsby). At work I swapped over to a Framework laptop with Gnome and Ubuntu, and I'm not entirely happy about that, but I simply don't have the time to rice around anymore. Still, your i3-plasma hybrid sounds enticing. Regolith supposedly exists for my setup, but it's not updated for 22.04 yet, sadly.
Please do! I have always had an interest in ricing and unixporn. I have a really boring XFCE setup myself, but love seeing other people's desktops.