Do you need a DE? I use sway and a few kde apps (konsole, okular, gwenview, dolphin) + firefox and thunderbird, I wouldn’t call that a DE…

if you want i3 but on wayland, you could try sway. It is exactly that, you can even reuse most of your i3 config file.

When I used it, I mostly switched between the 9 apps in my favorites/dock with the Meta+digit shortcuts. I rarely used anything besides those 9, and then I just used alt tab. It worked really well, no complaining.

Today it’s mostly the same, but with a tiling window manager and the same numbers: 3 is thunderbird, 5 is file browser for instance. It’s muscle memory at this point, feels great.

When you spent time tinkering on your linux box, at least you usually learn some piece of knowledge that can be applied later on.

When you tinker and debug something on windows, you usually have little idea of what went wrong and can derive very little from the experience. At least that was the case back when I still used windows, in the XP and vista days.