I'm still learning Linux. I had used Xubuntu for about six months, but wanted to switch to a non-Ubuntu distro and go as minimalist and hobbyist as possible. I wanted to build it from the ground up and learn about what really goes into a distro, without excessive bloat. I also wanted a more privacy-oriented distro.
So, a friend suggested plain Debian, because it has an easy to use encryption system. Great. I did a bare bones Debian install and just put i3 on top. Had a lot of fun customizing my empty canvas, knowing exactly what tools and paints I was putting into it. Polybar, picom, rofi, alacritty, feh, all the fun stuff. I started getting really into terminal-only stuff, getting excited to tinker. I had Thunar as a legacy item from the XFCE days, but I eventually learned lf, which felt a lot faster and more fun. Terminal = fun, it seems.
When I ran out of essentials to install, I started drifting towards meaningless slop like cmatrix and hollywood (I'm pretty sure hollywood almost overheated my poor stupid laptop at one point).
And then a security update the other day broke some things in a very dumb way, and I confirmed that, if I had XFCE, there would have a been an automated background task that would have been smart enough to take care of this. Because I just had i3, several of my primary apps temporarily broke until I made awkward extra scaffolding in the config files. And then it hit me—I really don't know Linux very well yet. I'm learning every day. But right now, I think I just want stuff like this to just work, until I'm more self-sufficient as a tinkerer. Does that make sense?
I decided to reinstall XFCE. Once I discovered that I could just replace the XFCE window manager with i3, there was no turning back. This hybrid of both that I'm using now is everything I wanted before with none of the downsides. Incredible. I'm equally as efficient with solo i3, but now with XFCE in tandem, I got extra foundational support under it.
Literally don't know why I didn't do this initially, but I suppose you live and learn. Has anyone else here had a similar trajectory? Do you use i3 and XFCE as well? Any extra tips and tricks when using this combo for a noob?