I am potentially going to be able to put Linux on my work PC soon, have been using it on my personal PC and laptop quite happily with hyprland ontop of NixOS
Thinking of using NixOS for my work machine as well, however I don’t want to use hyprland or even Wayland as I need this machine to be stable and reliable (Nvidia GPU)
Is I3 still the best option for this or are there better alternatives? (leaning towards I3 ontop of KDE)
I’m also somewhat tempted to just go GNOME with the forge extension as it seems the most reliable, though the tiling on that extension is far from perfect
In a word - yes - i3 is incredibly productive and customizable, but it’s not for everyone. I’ve been using i3 with no DE or DM for about a decade. Every time I try to use a full DE like KDE, Gnome, etc, it’s just so slow and bloated, and gets in the way. And there’s 100’s of extra packages that get installed, and be updated, that I don’t use. I don’t need anything but terminals (of which I have about 40 open in 12 different virtual desktops), a browser, and an editor when vim isn’t enough. So for me, it’s perfect and simple. I don’t know what will happen when Wayland finally wins, but that’s 5-10 years away before it really wins.
I imagine once Wayland finally wins i3 users will turn into Sway users and that’s about it.
When Wayland is eventually ready, I will personaly look into river. At least that’s what I would do now but no doubts that by the time everybody move to Wayland there will be way more options to consider. Hopefully one will be a good replacement for bspwm.