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.

I love debian because it’s always there for you.

Interesting. Kept it in my wallabag, if I ever grow tired of sway.

I’d build my own. More seriously, I’d use a mac, but would pester all day, like the few weeks I tried macOS at work before bringing my own computer.

Setting up my weird keyboard layout :

• on Linux, it’s either there during the install, or sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration on debian
• on MacOS, it’s endless messing around with some weird bundle file in some specific folder but it depends on MacOS versions and the file manager won’t let you know where you are exactly nor type a folder path

Setting up a keyboard shortcut to launch a terminal with Meta+Return:

• on Linux, it might vary depending on your wm or DE, but it’s always easy
• on MacOS, you have a weird app to script actions, but I never managed to make it happen

Using a tiling window manager:

• install i3wm
• forget about it.

I would suggest:

1. Use any debian 12 iso
2. When you get to the stage where you get to choose what to install (it’s called tasksel and looks like : untick whatever desktop environment is selected. You’ll get a bare minimal install with no graphics server
3. Reboot into the installed system, and install whatever you want from there.

Honestly, you don’t need any app. I’m using Firefox on mobile and it’s way better than the app I tried.

Seems to me an inability to read plain text during the install.

For instance when you are asked to set the root password, it says that if you leave it blank, the user you’ll create will have sudo.
That’s the behavior you expect if you come from ubuntu or mint.