KDE is now my favorite desktop

I have a terribly uninformed question. Ive been using i3wm ever since I learned it exists. Ive always had old machines and used to run Lubuntu, and at some point moved to i3wm. Its super fast and light which is what I care about the most.

I dont feel like Im missing anything, but then again a lot of people dont know theyre missing things which they cant imagine (before cars if youd ask people what they wanted, they wouldve said faster horses, etc etc).

So: What am I missing by using i3wm instead of for example Gnome or KDE? I dont care about pretty and shiny and animations. What else? Surely the whole holabalooba cant all be about pretty drawings and animations...?

(Sure, I probably would be able to find out by myself by trying these things but... since my starting point is the belief that Im not missing something, why would I be looking at these things...?

KDE and gnome have nice point and click interfaces that are pretty natural.

If you feel at home in a terminal then you aren't missing much. However, if you want a nice GUI to configure your bluetooth headphones or network without having to know the various bluez commands then kde is nice to use.

I used i3 for a few years before switching to KDE 1 or 2 years ago. For me choosing a full Desktop Environment over just-a-window-manager is about getting all the basics already co-installed with it: a default file explorer, default calculator, default terminal other than xterm, especially a default network-manager GUI, a sys-tray already populated with volume / screen / power / bluetooth / mounted-devices / clipboard / clock & date, a launcher, a system-wide config GUI ... without a DE, every single one of these is a manual install (plus researching the best choices and verifying & comparing their quality live) and/or numerous configuration files in diverse places, googling their syntax / incantations ... since all this stuff is "side-show stuff" (ie not my code editor, browser, email client, office suite), I nowadays appreciate batteries-included when setting up a new machine, reducing overall time-to-code-editing. But the endless custom-tweaking back then was good fun back in its own right. =)

Excellent response, thank you. Ive finally understood the difference between "Desktop Environment" and "Windows Manager".

Calling this stuff "side-show" very much resonates with me. I set this stuff up once when I install i3wm on a new system, and it works well. The problem is when I want to do something that Id never foreseen, there I go into googling for the bash command I need, and that I find annoying.

Thank you. Yeah bluetooth headphones are a pain. When I used to use them I had memorized how to do it from bluetoothctl, though Ive since forgotten because I havent used bluetooth in a long time anyway.

I appreciate in KDE that it's an up to date traditional desktop environment. I learned computers with Windows 3.1, and that paradigm is still what feels the best to me, and KDE gives it in a nice looking, modern way, with a good bunch of quality of life features.

I think if you're curious, try it. Gnome as well, it's quite different. And if you're not, that's also perfectly okay, you are not missing anything crucial I think.

Thank you.

With KDE you get a lot more than just a window manager. And i3/sway have a very specific usecase and target audience.

By the way I've heard some people combine i3 with KDE, using i3 instead of KWin (which is its window manager component)

Id never heard of Sway. From the page, am I right in understanding that i3 is for X11 and Sway is for Wayland?

Yes basically, it's not the same dev yet sway is heavily inspired by i3 and works with i3 config files. As you wrote i3 is x11-only and sway is wayland.