I’ve been an avid fan of tilling wms/compositors, with having used Hyprland in the past and now Sway. Something I loved about both of these at first was the extreme customizability I had. Since I had a lot more free time then, I was experimenting almost daily with new changes, fancy animations, different “bar” applications (waybar, elkowars, ags, etc) and more, and I enjoyed tinkering quite a lot, even getting to a point where I thought my configuration looked decently attractive (albiet possibly not the best performance with all the random polling loops).
Nowadays though, I really don’t have much time and I’d prefer to have an experience that just works. I do currently have a Sway configuration that’s half-complete, primarily lacking a proper file explorer and partially incomplete/unthemed bar and app launcher. In the vast majority of cases, this partial configuration is actually enough, but in some minor cases, such as issues with styling of GTK/Qt apps, or lacking a file explorer, I end up needing to deal with it via workarounds. I simply don’t have much time to extend and fix up my config, so I’m looking for suggestions on a “desktop environment” that primarily provides tilling support, pretty much similar to (or exactly like) Sway, whilst also providing a basic set of sensible tools that a traditional DE like KDE or GNOME would provide.
I’ve used a few window managers that at least allow you to mix tiling with floating windows, which makes it easy to add all the standard tools from gnome or KDE. These window managers include (IIRC) awesomewm, qtile, and sawtooth (which I used for a long time), and others which I can’t remember the names of.
Buuuuuuuut
they all took a lot of tinkering, so they’re probably not what you want now that you have less time. So I endorse @waffle8946’s suggestion (I just couldn’t resist answering your question more directly first).
I use the pop-shell extension for Gnome, for similar reasons - I don’t really want to have to fuss around finding N different tools to do basic desktop things like screen locks and notifications and clipboard integrations.
It is mostly fine, though not perfect. There are a few flickers and glitches, like some app has its own idea of what it wants sizing to be, so windows that get resized several times because as an extension it needs to react to window events and send more in response.
I will get around to trying out cosmic soon, which has this as native to the compositor. If you’re setting off on a path of exploration, especially coming from minimal- to non-integrated DE background, it might well be a worthwhile place to start.