I’m currently using Manjaro with i3 and no desktop environment. The problems with Manjaro as well as the lack of cohesiveness and missing features from not having a DE are prompting me to switch distributions. This isn’t the point of the post but I want to keep the i3 workflow but achieve DE level (gnome level ideally) of polish and ease of use. If you have any recommendations for doing this shoot them my way.
Anyway, the two options I’m thinking of are fedora and nix. Fedora is a safe choice I think, I know what I’m going to get. Nix is really tempting. The idea that I can reproduce my system with one file is very tantalizing considering I already keep track of my dot files with git. My concerns about nix are regarding ease of use, learning curve, and polish. Is it wise to invest the time into learning something so niche like how to configure everything with nix, a skill that isn’t portable to any other distro? I’m not quite sure.
Also if anyone has tips for making switching distros easier I’d appreciate it.
Edit: I ended up choosing fedora. I added the pop shell for tiling and this workspace indicator extension. I only set it up yesterday but I’m very excited it seems like an incredible system.
In my experience, a good way to get a polished desktop with a tiling workflow is to use KDE / GNOME with a few extensions & i3 shortcuts. Unless you really care about customizing every part of your DE, the work of configuring i3 to match a proper DE in terms of polish might not be worth it.
I previously used GNOME with the Forge extension and a few simple extensions for a workspace indicator, disabling the workspace switch animation, etc. This worked quite well but since GNOME is not very configurable, you have to do a lot of that through extensions (e.g. disabling the workspace switch animation & popup). This is particularly annoying since GNOME updates tend to break extensions.
For that reason, I recently switched to KDE. Polonium is a very nice tiling plugin for it. Since KDE is pretty customizable, I didn’t really need a lot of other extensions to support my workflow. It’s mainly a matter of configuring keyboard shortcuts and a few other settings. I haven’t used KDE long enough to say how stable everything is under updates, but from what I’ve heard it should be a lot better than GNOME.
I personally use NixOS and Home Manager with the Plasma Manager module for KDE. It’s a steep learning curve but if you have fun learning new stuff it is worth it in my opinion.
Otherwise, a GNOME / KDE tiling setup will probably also be mostly reproducible if you just track your dot files. There’s always a bit of manual configuration but it’s also difficult to completely avoid that with NixOS (although probably possible).