In three years, I switched from i3 wm on arch to i3 wm on Ubuntu 16.04 and recently to gnome on Ubuntu 18.04. It sounds like a massive downgrade but I like the normie life for now, it let's me focus on more important things than writing my own scripts to reset the brightness.

You can enjoy i3 and avoid a lot of manual configuration/scripts by running i3 as a window manager in a fully fledged DE. I've been using Ubuntu Mate + i3 for several months now and it's great.

This is why I use xmonad. All the fun of a tiling wm, but it plays nice with Mate if I want to spend some time in "normie land" without going full normie

@nathanchere @landmaj what are the advantages of using Mate with a tiling window manager instead of using only the window manager? Is it just the apps that come with Mate?

@rantsauce all the conveniences of Mate (bar, session handling, admin apps, notifications/toasts, window decorations/titlebars etc) without needing to explicitly configure them, plus xmonad's workspace management and tiling of the actual application windows when I don't want to float them.

@nathanchere How about xmonad's key bindings? Do they conflict with those of Mate?

@rantsauce Of course you need to configure it to play nice, but it's much easier to do that on xmonad side with code-based configuration all in one place than to selectively add and configure things in Mate. If it was something I used regularly I would maybe reconsider, but for once in a blue moon it does the job.

Same here, from bspwm to gnome.

I still go on ricing rampage mode from time to time but with gnome I can get more things done.

Nothing wrong with having both side by side and choosing which one to activate from the login manager

@angryMoFo true, one for working, one for showing off XD