I have been using this setup since around 2014. At the time I used Gnome 2. And switched to Ubuntu Mate whenever Ubuntu switched to Unity/Gnome 3 (I am not even

I have been using this setup since around 2014. At the time I used Gnome 2. And switched to Ubuntu Mate whenever Ubuntu switched to Unity/Gnome 3 (I am not even sure which one it is now). It has always been rock solid. i3 never crashed on me. And you can hot-reload it anyway. I last rebooted my work laptop 103 days ago. It goes to sleep few times per day. And the battery last about 10h (down from 15h when it was brand new). For starting application I use a launcher called rofi via a shortcut. For status indicators and so on, I have configured the i3 status bar (i3bar) to give me battery status, cpu usage, different timezones of interest etc. The only fancy thing I did, was to use cute unicode glyph to indicate charging status (). i3bar has a "system tray" section. Where nm-applet will dock its wifi indicator/control icon. And other chat and conference applications will dock theirs little icons. I have no problem with any windows. You can customize everything either statically in the config or on the fly. For example, my chats applications are always moved to the scratch space area when running. I can summon them with a shortcut at any time from any desktop. I also have a shortcut to mark any floating window as sticky across any virtual desktop. This is useful for video conferencing, to keep the video visible at all time. Etc.