as others have mentioned, a window manager is one component of a desktop environment – under ideal conditions, a desktop environment collects and integrates a whole set of packages (both primary and supporting), unifying functional aspects as well as look-and-feel – whereas people starting with a window manager add in tools where working for them takes priority over working with other tools

• minimizing your desktop environment
  • Gnome and KDE
  • Xfce
  • LXDE and LXQt
• tiling extensions to existing desktops
  • Pop Shell, Tiling Shell, PaperWM for Gnome
  • (I know KDE has an equivalent, don’t know what it’s called)
  • can get simple half- and quarter-tiling in Xfce just through hotkeys
• switching out window managers in existing desktop environments
  • LXDE typically used Openbox
  • LXQt is pretty much window manager agnostic – distros commonly add Openbox, KWin or Xfwm – Tsujan seems favorable towards LabWC
  • Regolith packages a Gnome desktop with either i3 (Xorg) or Sway (Wayland) as the window manager
• starting with a window manager
  • can either start straight from tty or rely on a desktop manager
    • supporting apps usually handled by whatever autostart feature the window manager provides
  • stacking/floating – most traditional choice is often Openbox (Xorg) but looks like LabWC (Wayland) is continuing its legacy
  • tiling
    • tiling window managers tend to rely a LOT more on keyboard hotkeys and less on mouse usage
    • Xorg – HUGE selection, all down to how much work you want to put in and how large a community there is to help you out
    • Wayland – currently at the top are Sway (continuing i3’s tradition) and River (trying to grab the Awesome fans)
  • getting a window manager up and running is only one part of the equation
    • obvious next steps include choosing a file manager, an image viewer, a document reader, a video player, a web browser
    • less obvious is the behind-the-scenes apps – seat management, policy kit, clipboard handling, notifications, app launchers, desktop manager

Do you know what your problem is?

I’m not asking in a rhetorical way, I actually mean: what is the problem you are trying to solve?

If any DE you’ve tried works just fine, then just stay with it. There is no point in trying to get in with a specific clique here. Just use whatever works for you. If you find a specific need for something, THEN start looking around.

i3 and xfce can be combined to achieve a very practical result. Highly recommend. It’s trivial to setup on NixOS, at least.

An actual WM is not a DE, and if you use something like i3 (sway is the Wayland version) all it does is manage your windows. A DE includes a WM; GNOME’s is called gdm Mutter. If you install a WM yourself, that’s all you get. Docks, bars, etc. might have suggested or sibling implementations for a given WM, but you’ll be setting them up yourself and you can easily swap in other options, or just not have them. There’s also no included software suite with things like a file manager. You’re expected to pick and use whatever tools you like, which is exactly the appeal but can be intimidating if you’re used to a full fledged DE.

Tiling is just a way of organizing your windows, as opposed to the more common “floating” scheme that all the major desktop UIs use. You can totally use tiling in a DE, you just need an extension for it. I know they exist for GNOME and I’m sure there’s a way to do it on kde too. Even Windows has tiling modes available.

So you can probably just enable tiling on your current setup to try it out (or install GNOME on your VM --i know that PopOS! used to have a built in tiling mode, but it’s been years since I tried that so ymmv). Moving to a WM instead of a DE is a very different and more involved process that’s mostly for people who want a totally custom setup with no extraneous features that they don’t explicitly set up. It’s basically the UI side of doing an LFS or classic Arch install where you pick which system components to use by hand.

Some individual window managers are full-featured enough to be somewhat usable as program launchers all by their lonesome, such as awesome, fluxbox, and openbox. There’s also Enlightenment, which is somewhere between a bare WM and a DE. If you really want to play with standalone WMs, start with something from this paragraph.

Other WMs need a bunch of other things like dmenu and feh piled on top of them to get a useful environment. i3 is one of these. You can find and fit together enough software pieces to get a fairly full-featured environment out of one of these setups, but it’s more work than just installing the core portions of a DE.

Figure out first whether you’re dealing with X or wayland (hyprland is a wayland compositor, which is slightly different from a window manager). Read guides, and especiallly stay away from things that say they’re “lightweight” or “minimalist” until you’ve read the documentation and know exactly what you’re getting into, as they tend to be for advanced users. If you just want to play around and have no particular problem you’re trying to solve, just look for live CD/DVD/USB images you can boot inside a VM and save yourself some work.

Give Pop OS a look.

i’m using kde plasma with krohnkite autotiling extension and i like having the best of both worlds. plasma’s implementations of wayland features and fully working dynamic autotiling, which i can control with my keyboard.

You can use Paperwm or other extensions for gnome to get a feel for it.

Do you want a window manager or a desktop environment? They’re different things. A WM is a component of a DE but the latter also comes with a full set of applications along with it.

What I went with was installing LXQT so I have everything I’m used to working out of the box (language and keyboard setting, network manager, auto mounting of USB sticks, fonts, screen settings, autostart, etc). Then just replace the window manager with a tiling WM.