I've always liked i3 a lot but it was a real pain to get some stuff working (like connecting a new monitor, or having to deal with wifi and bluetooth, or using two different keyboard layouts). Everything had to be configured, and while that's great for understanding how things work together, it's pretty painful when you're just trying to get stuff done.

All the pain went away when I found Regolith [0], which I heavily recommend. It's i3 with Ubuntu but it comes with sensible defaults, a nicer theme and shortcuts to all the configs you could need out of the box. It really makes things a lot easier than using just i3, especially when doing a fresh install (it's available both as an installable image and as a package - I've had no issue with either).

Some default shortcuts are different so if you've been using i3 for a while you'll have to iterate a bit over the config to get to a comfortable point, but it's the same config file. I also changed the default terminal back to gnome term, since their default one doesn't have a scrollbar, but again it's pretty easy to do and you only do it once. All in all, really made my life better.

[0] https://regolith-linux.org/