In sway, put the lower priority windows in another workspace, or the scratchpad, or in tabs/stacks. You can bind keys to focus specific programs by their appid/class also, so even if they're on another workspace or monitor it'll jump right there.

It sounds like the scratchpad may be especially close to what you want.

Your sway solutions are hacks around the MRU stack of a stacking desktop environment though.

I don't want to leave the workspace nor go find which tab/stack I've put Spotify just to use it. And scratchpad is no better since I'd have to do an explicit summon/dismiss cycle between workspace and scratchpad just to recreate behavior I already have on a normal desktop env.

I'm surprised to hear that niri didn't work for you, I feel like it's a really good middle ground between tiling and floating window managers. It handles a lot of window resizing and arranging for me, without being too rigid. Windows can have any width they need without having to evenly divide my monitor.

Niri is a great system for spawning windows.

But it answers the question of:

"Alright, whenever I want the $app window, I just go to column X of workspace Y"

Which isn't something I want for 99% of the windows I have open.

Most of my app interactions are transient where I prefer "summon $app from the ether without navigating anywhere".

For example, here are low priority apps I have open: calendar, discord, whatsapp, notes, journal, database gui.

Niri would make me find a place to put these apps in the top level and then navigate to them which doesn't match their transient nature.

Makes sense I guess. I mostly work with a few long-lived applications, and I hate having to do any manual window management myself.

I'm fairly sure you could use scripting to come up with a Niri workflow that worked for your use case. Maybe something like niri-scratchpad (https://github.com/Vizkid04/niri-scratchpad). But I sympathize if you don't want to spend a ton of time experimenting with your tools when you already have something that works for you.

Maybe awesome-wm would be better for you then.

Yeah, I came to the same conclusion a few months back. Sadly I had to ditch KDE for GNOME due to an issue[0] specific to NixOS but after going through the gauntlet of tiling window managers and PaperWM/Niri over the years I've also settled on a traditional DE.

[0]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/126590