Hi, I ve been exploring some wm and came across i3wm. Ive been loving the workflow for it. Currently im using lm cinnamon and installed i3 on top. But I think its a janky setup.

is there a way to get mint stability + workflow of i3?

i3wm is my favorite window manager, but I find I can get a good 90% out of either Gnome or KDE Plasma, with a bit of settings fiddling.

I think I added "Metacity" plugin to Gnome, to get proper tiling. It was okay.

In KDE Plasma, I just poke the settings to maximize windows by default, and enable keyboard shifting windows into half screen increments.

It's an annoying compromise, but it's nice not to have all the jank that comes with tuning my i3wm setup to add basic features that KDE Plasma ships with.

Edit: And I'll be reading along, hoping someone else has a better answer than mine!

cinnamon and installed i3 on top

How does that work? Cinnamon has its own WM, you can't run another "on top".

Exact steps & description that led to your current setup please.

Linux Mint does not support i3, if you use it, you will be much on your own. These distros support i3 officially: https://distrowatch.com/search.php?desktop=i3#simple

Last time I set it up, i3wm basically does run "on top" or rather mixed in with componenets of other desktop environments.

Tehnically, one can run i3wm alone, but really, it wants a bunch of parts from another desktop environment to be loaded, and it's not particularly opinionated about which ones.

If I recall correctly, picking it (a friendly i3wm meta-package) on Ubuntu gave me i3wm with a bunch of pieces of Mate pre-loaded to fill in the edges.

The previous time I set up i3wm, there was no friendly package (yes, I'm old), so I looked up the names of about a dozen Gnome services and applets, and added them to the i3wm config to launch them on i3wm start-up.

(Edit: missed an important not)

i3wm basically does run “on top” or rather mixed in

That's not the same

Oh no!

Edit: You uave brought pedanticness, rather than value to the discussion. You can do better.