I don't understand why you would install i3 on #!. Having tried it, I found the only thing really distinguishing #! from vanilla Debian was a nicely configured

I don't understand why you would install i3 on #!. Having tried it, I found the only thing really distinguishing #! from vanilla Debian was a nicely configured Openbox environment. If you're not going to use Openbox, why not just start with a base Debian install?