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.

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.