Another i3 user here. I slowly transitioned from KDE when switching keyboard layout stopped working as well as some other DE related things.
Ended up writing custom script for switching. Currently implemented with rofi in Perl, bc I like the syntax.
I still like having a bit nice gui, so i have wallpapers, some icons, etc. But I fell in love with terminal along with neovim : ) , soo kinda looking for that middle ground between look, performance and functionality.
Haven’t finished tweaking all the configs to my liking, but after that vanilla Arch is the direction I plan to go, since many things in my current install that I have as well as haven’t customized work a bit questionably or exist for no reason.
+1 He provides tons of good info