Ask HN: How do I transition into i3/ awesome from Gnome?

In my opinion, as someone who used i3 exclusively for years but switched back to Gnome, don't bother.

You're not actually going to be more productive with a different window manager. You may feel more productive, but it's highly unlikely that how quickly you switch between windows is an actual bottleneck in your life.

Kickstart your configuration by looking around on github for other users' dotfiles, everybody needs to do some common things after all, like opening programs, changing volume, brightness, suspending, etc.

My dotfiles repo is private but here is mine: https://gist.github.com/simonacca/425dad70526bcfd9c6af7ed5f4...

In what way? Dive right in. Set your own shortcuts, and just use it. It's not terribly different, you're just not dragging windows around and everything is fully maximized unless you use some sort of gaps system. Check the i3 documentation, reddit i3 forums, and also /r/unixporn can be useful for finding things that will assist you with tiling wm's.

Are you asking how to install it? Or how to become adept at it?