I've been trying out i3, and I've got to say I really like the minimalist approach. I always wanted to get into some sort of tiling window manager since I've used tmux for about a year now and I've been loving it. I've tried awesomeWM but I gave up after getting stuck on a few parts.
I'm still working on my configuration. I was thinking it would be fun to see what other people use on these forums.
i loved the crap out of i3 Manjaro, but they have a horrible habit of shoving their colour scheme into every crack and crevasse, and their forums frequently return the "iunno" response when asked about unfucking things.
also dotshare.it has an i3 section, but i haven't tried any of them.
Yea, I'm just using Ubuntu Gnome as my base and then installed i3, so I have a pretty clean install afaik (in terms of i3 themes, etc). It should be pretty easy to change the color to your linking as long as its just editing ~/.config/i3/config. I have a feeling that it comes with other plugins/scripts though, so you may need to update multiple files.
Been working fine. I think made the mistake of installing an older version of i3 though (using the default apt-get install i3 on xenial atm). I have occasional screen tearing when scrolling in chromium. Apparently this tearing issue was fixed on 4.12, which is just one minor version away from what I have.
I wish there were i3 "distributions", much like there are emacs distributions (e.g., see spacemacs/prelude). Even though I don't use emacs, I wish more people looked at what they're doing and try to reproduce it. The idea in the case of i3 would be to have a base configuration along with a set of plugins configured out of the box which is easy to install. You would then be able to install it on whatever Linux distribution you want. Note that this would probably require i3 to have its own package management system to work across Linux distributions.
I have an Arch box ready for i3 but haven't gotten around to putting it on there. At this point - if I can get a nix laptop that doesn't crap out with wifi - I'd like use it as a host to create a vm instance of Arch and put i3 on there. That way I can snapshot it till I get a good install and then redo my on the metal install on the previously mentioned laptop.
What I've been doing while I get fully accustomed to i3 is, as I already mentioned, start with an Ubuntu Gnome base. After installing i3, I can select what desktop I want from the login screen. If I ever get stuck on something and want to revert to a different desktop I can just log out, then log back in as a Gnome 3 session (well actually atm I'm using budgie desktop as my fallback but you get the idea). Just select the desktop you want at login using the gear icon.