I’ve been poking around with Sway, coming from Gnome (which I mostly love). What got you into i3 vs a normal desktop, and how long did it take you to realize it was a good fit?
Phew, I've been using tiling window managers for 15+ years now so I don't really know. I've always been interested in trying out different window managers and UI/UX concepts.
When I started with Linux in the 90's it had FVWM by default as graphical interface which was pretty different when being used to Amiga, Atari ST and Windows 3.1. (They were all pretty different from each other.)
Of course I had to run Enlightenment with some rusty graphics when I discovered it, but I think WM2/WMX[1] was the first window manager where I realized I preferred the more minimalistic ones.
After trying out more WMs I ended up at awesome[2] which I ran for years. It had the best support for both floating and tiling windows. (I do like some floating windows now and then but never liked the "normal" desktop concept which is, paraphrasing Fred Brooks, more of a flight seat concept.)
Then WMs like xmonad started appearing and I tried those out but they're pretty much "tiling only" and I did not like xmonad's tiling windows approach. It's been too long since I used it and I'm not sure it is still applicable but it forced you to use specific layouts and the current window was always maximized.
So at some point i3 appeared (like fish shell and Doom Emacs) and when trying it out it by default already did most of the things that I liked and that I had to configure in other window managers, so that was nice. It was a pretty good fit right away.
I have used some other WMs like EXWM and StumpWM over the years because I'm both an Emacs and Lisp weeny but they're like less mature i3 clones so I've been back at i3 for a while now.
