Also, are you sure you want to use a tiling compositor on a gaming laptop
I can't go back to moving windows around by hand. It's so tedious. I can't stand it anymore. Even on Windows which I use for work I always install FancyWM to achieve some sense of tiling. It's just imo a superior way to use a computer.
That said, GNOME has the fantastic Pop Shell 2 which functions similar to Hyprland or i3, so that's fine on GNOME. Honestly, I'm hopeful for COSMIC and plan to try it out once it gets out of Alpha.
The problem I have with GNOME is I always end up breaking it in a way that I can't restore it. Some extension or GTK theme tweak or something, even when uninstalled, always seems to get it stuck in a bad state. It doesn't like customization. KDE does, but it doesn't have as good tiling support (there's Polonium, which is... okay).
Perhaps I'll try it again tho. I've used GNOME for several months at a time before, but I had problems when switching to Wayland a couple years ago initially (which I'm sure are fixed now).
You know that i3 has support for mouse, right? Really good support in fact.
I use the mouse all the time in tiling window managers, not exclusively keyboard shortcuts, especially for well, window management. Win + Right Click and drag to resize and Win + Left Click to move a window into place. However, unlike traditional desktops, when I move the window, it snaps to a reasonable and consistent tiling location instead of just left/right snapping, a random place it can get covered up, or tiled using some awful extraneous system like KDE's tiling system or some of the Windows little GUI popups. I also sometimes use floating windows.
The nice thing about tilers is they can do traditional usage well whereas traditional desktops cannot do tiling well. Heck, dynamic tilers can't even do tiling well.
I often make use of very complex layouts like this:
That many windows with different priorities and visible at once is just not possible to do in traditional desktops or even in dynamic tilers like DWM or KDE's Bismuth plugin.
I need something that makes window organization EASY, and that is manual tilers.
I'll have to look into the scrolling compositor. That does sound interesting.
Also, I don't understand what you mean here. I'm very curious to what troubles you had with workspaces.
What is there to manage? Do you not use virtual desktops at all anymore? I use them even in traditional desktops (including Windows).
It's just a place to put more windows when you run out of room on a screen or when doing a different task, what's the difficulty there?
Did you always use all 10? I don't usually need more than 2, and if I do, then I don't usually need more than 4