In a way, yes. It stays out of the way - in fact, there is no desktop. i3 is a tiling window manager, and rather minimalistic at that. Sway is a wayland-native

In a way, yes. It stays out of the way - in fact, there is no desktop. i3 is a tiling window manager, and rather minimalistic at that. Sway is a wayland-native reimplementation of i3, with the same (lack of) appearance, and i3 configs work with sway pretty much out of the box. To launch a program you either hit a hotkey combo of your choice or use <win>-d to bring up a top-of-screen text menu bar with full text search to find (and launch) your desired software. Stating the obvious: I've never been a fan of desktop environments. I found them confusing even back in the GEOS (C-64) and windows 2.x days.