I used i3 for a while when unity had a really annoying multi-touch bug I could not work around.

The thing is? I never used much more than a simple L/R split that was available in any OS / WM forever. If I wanted to split more, it was usually in the terminal, and done via tmux or the term app.

Add to this, a full desktop environment will handle all sorts of things for you like brightness, volume controls, proper locking on sleep, a easily configurable toolbar, hot plugging an external display, etc. i3 handles none of these! It's left up to the user to google around and find a brightness command that actually works, or why pauctrl is muted on startup, or why the lock screen only locks on resume, not sleep, thus flashing your screen. It's death by a thousand cuts. I know i3 is a window manager, and it's 'not it's job' to handle this stuff, supposedly, but why could they not add the most common way people control brightness, volume, etc to the default config, and let people swap it all out if they wanted? It's a really frustrating experience.

For myself, I've went back to gnome. If someday I get a really massive display that benefits from complex tiling, I'll revisit i3, but I'll probably wind up using that awesome material shell for gnome and calling it a day.

https://old.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/c8le62/gnome_mate...