The easy answer to your second point and some integrated experience is the unix philosophy of 'do one thing but do it right'. I was also frustrated at the beginning, but I dealt with it and now I have i3 mappings to do most of what I used to do through GUIs. I can also do much more through scripting because I know which commands to use to handle clipboard, screens, etc.

If you use your computer once a week to check your emails I understand that it's just a waste of time. If you do more, long-term investments such as these might be worth it.

Now I agree that a more integrated experience out of the box would make the learning curve more gentle. Some have mentioned Regolith, it looks like it would be better for you than plain i3 (I haven't tried it personally so I can't judge): https://regolith-linux.org/

I get 'do one thing, and do it well', but there's absolutely nothing stopping the i3 folks from putting sensible defaults in the config for controlling brightness, sound, etc. It's simply a lack of care for the user experience.

I have tried regolith, but I found it to have weird conflicts between i3 and gnome. It may be worth another look though.

I'm not sure what kind of defaults you would like to see. For instance I have this in my i3 config:

bindsym XF86AudioRaiseVolume exec --no-startup-id amixer sset 'Master' 2%+ bindsym XF86AudioLowerVolume exec --no-startup-id amixer sset 'Master' 2%-

but there's no guarantee that this would work everywhere depending on what's installed, I just know that it works in my case. It's easy enough to look up anyway ('linux change volume from terminal'), so users would just save 5 minutes if the default worked for them. I think the message is that i3 is not targeting the same people as Gnome, and it's fine. Different software for different needs and trade-offs.

MATE with i3 as its window manager is excellent. No compromises, neither gets in the other's way. I wrote how to set it up here: https://www.mattgreer.org/articles/mate-and-i3/

This. I just install debian with MATE, install i3 on top, clone i3 config file from my git repo and all setup is done. Sound works, brightness works, external displays work.

If you're at all interested in tiling window managers, I can't recommend regolith enough. It's built on top a minimal ubuntu install and gnome-settings-daemon, so it gives you most of the non-window manager desktop stuff you would expect. At first, the distro was all the same stuff I would uninstall/install to roll my own environment. But they keep working on it and expanding the docs.

The only difficult part for me, is that they change the i3 config defaults. So often, instead of checking the i3 docs, I have to read my local config first.

I just wrote in another comment that I wish I had a little more desktop in my i3/sway, and this looks to be the ticket.

For a while, KDE supported using i3 as the window manager. So you got the whole "plasma desktop" for things like volume controls and locking, etc but then you get i3 for managing windows. That's the beauty of software with a focused scope.

I haven't tried to set it up in a while, I'm sure you could get the same setup running with sway under wayland with some effort.

All those niceties you're talking about are handled by a settings daemon for the major DEs.

You can easily run the Gnome or XFCE settings daemon without launching a session of their window manager.

I use a tiling window manager configured to work alongside XFCE, which provides many of those things you listed, with maybe the exception of hot plugging an external display and the keybindings for volume/brightness. It means I get a preconfigured panel, a set of small GUI utilities designed to work together, and also the ease/comfort of the window management scheme that I prefer.

> I never used much more than a simple L/R split

I use multi-displays too (XMonad; I assume i3 has the same!).

I use more complex splits occasionally for dev work I quite like it but I guess I could use something more conventional if it were keyboard-friendly.

Yeah, there’s a core of “just enough” desktop support that I wish I could get with i3 and Sway that I didn’t have to painstakingly do myself.

Try https://github.com/gTile/gTile

or

https://regolith-linux.org/

regolith works only under ubuntu though but both should work under gnome.

there is pop shell as well https://github.com/pop-os/shell