@ibreakthings@SgtAwesomesauce Thanks for all you help. I wound up reinstalling my Fedora 23 [ unrelated issue with disk partitions and drive encryption ] and Install i3 on top of Gnome 3.18. I ran dnf update afterwards and began to "Rice" my i3 install. Very impressed with it so far.
I have to tackle my network issue tonight when I reinstall my VPN, although I bring up gnome-control-center and wifi now works along with all the other features.
I made adjustments to i3status.conf for VPN, Battery, DHCP, Date to suit my needs. So far so good !
If you're looking into the i3 bar configuration, the software I'm using for the bar is i3blocks, I've made some custom scripts for it, but it's pretty simple to get working. Theres also lemonbar
Definitely let us know if we can help with anything.
I've uploaded my dotfiles to github here. I'm working on a few scripts for i3lock to do some cool stuff with image modification.
Check out i3lock-blur, which screenshots your desktop, blurs the screenshot and puts a lock icon on top of the image, centered on the primary monitor. the requirements for that are i3lock, scrot and imagemagick.
I'm working on a v2 of i3lock-blur which will have configurable options via CLI flags. I'm hoping the functionality will be ready in the next few days.
Also, if you're looking for a bar replacement, check out lemonbar. Not sure if there's a Fedora package for it.
EDIT: I've finished my script, which can be found in bin, for manipulating a screenshot to make a lock screen out of it.