I'm currently using kde and am loving it but online i keep on seeing people say, just get "hyprland or sway". I want to know why they are so praised compared to a normal DE and why people praise the productivity of them.
Yeah they do look clean and minimal. They do level up a system in how you can change the looks and it organizes the system by itself rather than having floating windows, but why are they "essential for every linux user?"
Image credits to u/panospanagia on r/unixporn
I've generally been happy with tiling extensions for gnome/kde/macos/windows, though more recently I've been experimenting with niri (a scrolling tiling wm) on an extra device to see if i like it more. It is more work, but its also been fun. Jury is still out if it'll become my default.
Imo, the reason to move away from one of the traditional desktop environments like gnome/kde to sway/hyperland/i3/etc is if you arent happy enough with built-in tiling featues or extension/add-on tiling features. The wayland ecosystem has expanded options quite a bit, but any sort of diy setup around a tiling compositor will always require more work and come with fewer comfort features that youd be used to with kde/gnome/etc. But maybe you don't need any of those things or find tiling more important.
People who use tiling window managers are more likely to be power users and thus tend to be overrepresented in these spaces. No one is gonna talk unprompted about the mouse-centered built in window management that is fairly consistent across all operting systems at this point.
I've primarily been using PaperWM on Gnome for the last 4 years or so, and the main issues are awkwardness/conflicts where it collides with Gnome. Basically a "death by a thousand cuts" feeling that has built up over time. In Gnome's defense, it doesn't try to be flexible for alternate window management tools. I don't care much for KDE or the wider KDE software stack, but it tends to be more flexible by nature.
In an ideal world, KDE and Gnome would allow you to swap out the compositor layer for sway/niri/whatever, which would reduce the conflict points considerably. Cosmic has early support for this, as does LXQt, but there are legitimate project direction reasons for the devs to not do so, at least not any time soon. Wayland does make it much more likely to happen in the future, from an architectural standpoint.
(Addendum: I haven't used windows for many years, but Power Toys has a solid tiling window manager. Or at least, it did for windows 10. No idea if it got support for windows 11. Worth trying out if using windows and wanna try tiling!)