this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2026
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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)