Could you link an example? Some tiling window manager users just don't care much about appearances (my general approach to window decoration is to get rid of it

Could you link an example? Some tiling window manager users just don't care much about appearances (my general approach to window decoration is to get rid of it), but it should be possible to approximate the appearance of windows under any desktop environment via configuration tweaking (eg Firefox themes, font settings, GTK/Qt themes). You are likely to find that a stand-alone WM requires more manual configuration than a DE. Most DEs have more-or-less unified settings managers, but those settings are really for many disparate components of the environment that a WM won't even try to control. It might be possible to recover some convenience by using a third-party settings manager like the previously mentioned lxappearance (I find the Arch Linux wiki a useful resource in this regard even though I don't run Arch). Alternatively, you can use xmonad with Xfce (or another DE). That's what I did before completely switching to xmonad and it does make settings management easier.