If you want a tiling WM backed by a full DE ( with sleep, volume buttons, media buttons, working automagically ) you should try Regolith[0]
Would be good to get it out of the PPA and into official ubuntu repos.
- having windows automatically start at "empty" coordinates if available,
- having sufficient shortcuts to position them on specific square coordinates.
Since I have a wide screen, I have configured win-[, win-] and win-\ to go to the left third, middle third, right third.
On a thinkpad, I complement that by having win-left to the left half (50%), win-right go to the right half (50%), win-pgup toggle half size top and win-pgdown toggle half-size bottom.
Then I can assemble the windows very precisely with just the keyboard (full screen, half screen, quarter screen, one-third of a screen, one-sixth of a screen) both on the laptop display and the external wide screen, while keeping the full convenience of normal titlebars and mouse operations to reposition windows by hand if needed.
Add to that some custom scripting to make win-left and win-right move between physical screen, and you get a tiling solution that do not require any specific window manager.
Of course, space taken by the title bars might be a problem, but with Mica and the like (more generally, titlebar moving from "full of wasted empty spaces to "where tabs are shown", like Edge now does), I think tiling WM are quickly becoming a thing of the past.
But it would just be nice to have the full DE backing behind i3 as a distribution. Yes I know you can do everything here with list of tools, but I just want a configuration that I know has been thought out, with best practices, and easy to modify in a reproducible way. The list of dotfiles and little adjustments alone you need to marry i3 with a power manager, menu bar, network manager, is a lot! I just want the work done for me (a DE).
It seems to me you are introducing complexity for complexity sake, with nothing to be gained - except maybe nerd credential points for using i3?
All distros are basically the same but with different default packages and package managers.
Fortunately, regolith is open source and has repos for their default configs. Get the right packages installed on Arch and copy the regolith configs for those packages. and you have yourself an arch regolith clone.