Is there a TWM that works well out of the box? no

I love about sway/i3 → my desktop doesn’t change. Once you got everything setup the way you like it, stuff just works. Beside this, switching between applications on different workspaces becomes a natural thing to do. When I think file-manage, my fingers press alt+3 and the focus is on the file manager… that is the magic of tiling window managers.

tbh the main selling point of it is that you can pick and prod and tweak it extensively to make it look and feel EXATLY like you want, for your use case I think you’re more than fine with KDE

It works fine for you, as you said. So no need to switch, right?

I am a Linux power user for over 10 years, used tiling window managers most of the time but switched to KDE Plasma about two years ago and am completely happy with it.

My advice: if you’re happy, there’s no need to change anything!

I am of the opinion that i3wm works quite well by default. I rarely have to tweak anything other than a few personal QoL features.

No, it’s only really a tinkering tool. I prefer free as in free time, so I can actually do work.

I’ve used several TWMs that I loved but ultimately I just went back to gnome. There were a couple of reasons: I got tired of having to configure stuff or at least memorize a bunch of shortcuts and the failed to handle multi-window applications like gimp (in the pre-single window mode days).

I used dwm, i3 and wmii and they were all usable except for the issues above.

Try bismuth, works even with Wayland enabled.

https://github.com/Bismuth-Forge/bismuth

Decide for yourself if you like it or not.