There is no “best WM”, only “best WM for you”. If you’re deep enough into this rabbit hole to install an alternative WM, at this point you’re the best judge of what’s the best, really.

As always there’s no such thing as a global “best” application. Building your system is a very personal thing. It all depends on your needs and liking.

My personal journey in the tiling WM world has started 20 years ago with awesomewm. Then I moved to i3 because it feels lighter to me while offering a configuration approach I preferred. After some times, I felt ready to “really” build my tiling WM and I moved to dwm.

I couldn’t be happier until I came across bspwm which is as suckless as dwm but EWMH compliant. I also love the nice approach of keybindings offered by sxhkd. What I appreciate the most is the no limit configuration power since you can integrate the very powerful program that writes messages on bspwm 's socket (bspc) in any scripts you can imagine. This let you create some crazy and very personal rules. For example, I designed one where bspwm is listening to my video player state and if not fullscreen it automatically resizes it to a given size and moves it to a specific position. I have another one that will apply borders only to 2 specific windows applications and use a different color for each one.

This is a very brief overview of what I’ve experimented. Your expectations and the time you want to deserve to your configuration may guide you on another path. Archwiki has a comparison of tiling WM may be a good starting point to help you in your decision.

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.

You should check out XMonad. It’s the only formally verified tiling WM.

I got it working with NixOS and have my whole config online.

https://github.com/harryprayiv/nix-config/blob/intelTower/home/programs/xmonad/config.hs

I did some weird stuff with a custom Hue CLI Module for my lab. It’s a fun little, fairly kludgey example of something you could spin up super easily.

In Haskell (much of the time), they say if it compiles it ships! It’s a lazily-evaluated language which lends itself well to a config and it slots right into NixOS quite well since Nix is also a lazily evaluated purely functional language.

For X11, BSPWM was my daily driver. (before I switched to Sway, then Hyprland)

Try HerbstluftWM. It’s quite simple but very flexible to configure.

Wayland on nvidia is perfectly stable. Been using Hyrpland without issues for the past year or so.

My personal favourite is qtile and it’s been my main WM for a long time. I3 is another good option. Wayland experience looks to vary from the other comments, but if you do use qtile and wanted to try wayland, you can get it to run using it (although I’ve never tried it myself).

Some of the X11 WMs are dwm, awesome, qtile, bspwm, etc.

Gonna leave here a link of a list of X11 WMs if you are interested.

Like some have said on this thread, there isn’t really a better wm, it all comes down to your own needs.

Upopular opinion: Herbstluftwm.

Try out LeftWM ! It’s a dynamic tiling window manager, and it’s a reamly cool project with a very nice community. It’s still a bit rough around the edges but it’s worth trying considering how much options it offers.