Just one more tweak

That's what I've got (on Gentoo).

I always ran startx & exit to prevent someone from VT switching to a logged in console if my screen was locked :)

Hah that's what I always had on Debian on my laptop back in the version 9 days (buster?). Nothing's stopping you from doing it now with runlevels. I think with systemd it's just systemctl set-default multiuser.target

You can then always get the full boot with systemctl isolate graphical.target

Might not be the exact command but it's something like that for sure.

Been a while but isn't that very insecure? Gotta run startx & exit ;)

Well, one can always uninstall the DE, right?

A fresh install of debian without DE will do that at least

Every year or so I fire up a VM, install a window manager on it, realize I have no idea WTF I'm doing, and nuke the VM and go back to my regular KDE desktop.

I used to do the same, but recently I've found a dustro and window manager that just work for me. The distro is Fedora atomic, and the window manager is sway.

I pretty much just used a floating window manager like a tiling one, almost always snapping them to 1/2 or 1/3 of the screen. Eventually I tried sway, and after learning some of the shortcuts, it seems like the perfect window manager for someone like me.

I'm in the same boat so I started getting my "tweaking" fix by making my own themes. Just got my first cursor theme working and it's awesome!

Same. The temptation is strong but I don't know if it'll be worth the time and effort when Xfce already works fine for me.

What do you use? I'm happy with i3 and haven't looked at other window managers in a while.

that is just barbaric, you should do it at least once a month.

I did all of grad school with i3wm. And I spent a very, very long time in grad school...

i3 took my wm virginity and it was great

... had to use ...

Can you explain why was that? Asking genuinely.

Also, the fact that you can edit COSMIC through config files is a game changer. Although I don't really like the tiling layout style, sometimes I want something easy to setup like GNOME but with good autotiling

You could use your twm within kde or xfce. I've never done it, but people who have seem to be happy with it.

I haven't tried it, but I've heard you can use a third party wm inside plasma.

My mostly stock Gnome was Caffeine, Vertical Workspaces, Sane Airplane Mode, No Startup Overview... can't remember what else and the exact names of the extensions.

Unfortunately I do not have one of those videos, my experience with youtubers is that usually they do not go in depth.

The most powerful wm's can be the ones based in tags(instead of workspaces) like dwm and riverwm, but they are conceptually harder to wrap your head around them and can be of higher cognitive effort than regular workspace wms.

Window managers potential varies and even more so with your personal workflow. I would suggest checking the window manager for:

• tag/workspace based
• window tags(for workspace based)
• window/workspace/tag movement
• layouts
• window tab/group
• input support
• output support
• decorations

The most important ones are workflow related because you cam always have a hotkey daemon running if the wm's input support isn't as good.

Here are my dotfiles, none of those wm configs use all features but you get the idea.

Just so you know I have tried Plasma 6 and know it feels more simple, intuitive and consistent than 5. KDE has done a nice job of making it friendlier.

I have tried both of them. They are both powerful on their own respect. Niri is still on its early days so things like floating window are a work in progress (last time I checked), but things like its window management is great if you can set up nice keybinds for the multitude of actions available and its scrolling behaviour works like a charm on laptops. Niri also has a configuration file validator that you can use before restarting Niri which is genius! One thing you might hate or love is the dynamic workspaces, workspaces are moved/renamed so that they are consecutive. So if you had four occupied workspaces ( 1 through 4) and clear workspace 3 now you would have three consecutive workspaces (1 through 3) effectively making workspace 4 now be workspace 3.

River is super fast because of how minimal it is plus it has some nice community layouts available to suit your taste better. Also the tag window management can be the fastest out there but can become hard if not set up properly. It was to cool and all but I feel it is more for power users and it totally overwhelmed me when I tried to set up stuff to set tags for windows and move them around monitors (and that when you move a window to a monitor it does not keep focus on it). The way I use Sway and Hyprland is to set workspaces for different monitors and it just feels easy for me to move windows around focusing(or not) the destined workspace. I think the best feature of River is to toggle any window on your focused tag, it really feels like magic.

Hope that helps.

Whatever works for you, I prefer the looks and intuitiveness of Gnome but prefer Plasma's functionality, reason why I'm using a wm. I get my personal functionality and my personal looks for the most part. If a had to choose form those Desktop Environments I would probably choose Plasma because after their 6.0 release it is more cohesive, consistent and intuitive than before.