You can configure borders and install a status bar with more powerful theming features such as polybar, which will make i3 quite pretty in a minimalist way, but it will never be anything fancy if that's what you're looking for.

You can also use Nerdfonts to set some beautiful icons for your desktops in the bar displaying desktops in i3wm.

well some people make fancy borders and the like. a tiling window manager shouldn't look like anything really just your programs. its very utilitarian i like i3 but am still partial to dwm; i3 has a lot more out of the box and probably easier to configure for most until you want to add your own patches then dwm is a lot easier imo.

Depends on the distro. Grokking the Arch Linux workflow around PKGBUILD and using `makepkg -si` is pretty easy. Debian makes it a bit tricker, but still manageable.

What do you even see of a tiling wm? They don't have window decorations, you can use any panel, so the "look" is a blank screen.

I3 actually has decorations, with a title bar and borders.

Still it retains the pretty utilitarian aesthetics common to most twm. I don’t mind it but some might prefer gui to terms, docks to panels, desktop icons, wallpaper and widgets to a dense grid of windows.

My wife tends to “shake” the windows she is unhappy with. The zoom client app mostly. I would not fare to suggest non shakable UI.

How do you manage to see them? They are supposed to be mostly invisible. A thin border around windows? A status bar, eventually... and that s it.

Just apply any theme you want with https://www.gnome-look.org/ or https://www.xfce-look.org/ or https://www.box-look.org/

You should take a look at PaperWM for Gnome. It combines functionality if i3 with Gnome aestetics. But it also makes tiling simpler, open windows are only side by side, but with several workspaces. It also uses "Win" key for everything so it is very convenient, and do not collide with other Linux mappings.

They just give you the bare minimum so that you can configure it the way you want. And it's really easy to configure, at least i3 since it's the one I use. If you don't feel like configuring it yourself you can always go to r/unixporn and copy someone else's configuration.

For some inspiration on beautiful setups, check out /r/unixporn. i3gaps is popular there - but IMO the gaps are a waste of screen real-estate and not worth it for the looks.

Also maybe check out Gnome Shell? Haven't tried it personally but tile-y and similar look and feel to modern GNOME/Unity, if that's what you're after.

I'm on Ubuntu 20.04 with GNOME. Used to hate Gnome Shell, Unity was much better suited to my workflow (and wasted less screen real estate). But Canonical has actually made it usable over the last few years, so I'm generally quite happy with it. But it doesn't quite have the flexibility of a real twm.

You'll get used to it. It's like black coffee.

Ugly? What do you mean with that? Sway on openSuse is quiet nice composed.

Specifically I meant the pixel-blue window borders on i3, coupled with the extremely bare-bones status bar. (Does it even allow for systray icons? That would be rather important for me.)

Sway looks somewhat better, but I've been told it's still somewhat flaky.

Well i3 is kind of configurable:

http://dotshare.it/public/images/uploads/8435.png

http://dotshare.it/public/images/uploads/8284.png

http://dotshare.it/category/wms/i3/

>Does it even allow for systray icons?

Yes.

>extremely bare-bones status bar.

You can config everything in it, or use polybar.

>Sway looks somewhat better

Sway is a drop-in replacement.