What DE do you recommend installing together with a tiling window manager?

Hi everyone, I have been using TWM on a virtual machine but I would like to install it on my main pc but I would like to have a desktop-like Gnome or Mate next to my TWM, in this case, which DE do you recommend installing? because I was thinking of installing bspwm and then installing the DE (Mate or Gnome) I would like to know your opinion because I have seen that with some DE there is some kind of conflicts.

Usually WM almost never have conflicts with DE.

Still, Xfce is the safest bet imo. I use WMs mainly, but also keep Xfce installed on my machines.

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I’ve had zero issues with both BSPWM and Xfce installed, but I rarely go into it.

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If I were me, I’d check out this tutorial for xfce+i3.

MATE and lxde are also possible to set this up on.

I believe it should also work on lxqt, but I’ve never tried.

Gnome is very difficult in my experience. I would just use the pop tiling extension. Plasma is also difficult, but again, krohnkite or bismuth are easy enough it’s not worth it imo.

Cinnamon has literally nothing. It’s the best DE for ab openbox style imo, but the worst if you have even the slightest inkling to tile. It will do two Windows snapped together very nicely though.

And yes, I’ve tried tiling everything lol.

There is. DEs are not inherently designed to do this at all. As you’re already aware of since you’ve seen that there is conflicts.

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The Arch wiki should have a section on alternate window managers for each desktop environment.

For the “major environments”, I found the following:
Cinnamon: No support for alternate window managers.
Gnome [Shell]: No support for alternate window managers.
Gnome [Flashback]: Metacity and Compiz only
Gnome [Custom Session]: Possible but a pain in the rear.
Mate: Yes
LXQT/DE: Yes
Plasma: Yes, believe it or not. KDE Tutorial
XFCE: Yes

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I tried to have Plasma and Bspwm but had a conflict between them a plasma overlay on bspwm. I will try bspwm with LXQT hope it works.

Plasma was VERY difficult to setup properly as Kwin is very integrated into the experience. XFCE is old school and significantly easier. I’m certain bspwm will work fine. As far as lxqt goes - It just always feels like it’s missing something to me. Everytime I try it, I’m disappointed, so I just never really bothered, but I’m certain it’s doable. Even zentile works in lxqt, so I would imagine you can easily do it.

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I suggest XFCE. It’s mature and stable.

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