I like Debian and wonder if there's a best practise setup for desktop environment plus i3wm. Everyone seems to do something different and the setups I've seen have all had minor quirks (wifi tray icon, sound control, locking, etc).
Currently my main machine is Ubuntu 14.04 with Xcfe and i3wm and I have a few quirks (something about the keyboard charset picker never aligning with the Xcfe tray).
For what it's worth, I also use i3 under Arch. I don't think there is a canonical right distro or anything, but then again I've only ever used it under Arch so what do I know? Also like the sister comment, I also use dmenu & i3bar to handle the rest of my needs. I generally stay away from things like conky.
Good luck, although I generally found i3 a breeze to set up. Part of that is due to the fact it was already 95% of what I wanted in a WM. I didn't have to spend hours and hours customizing it like dwm or Awesome. Your mileage will, of course, vary.
I will say that the Arch wiki page on i3 is a treasure trove of info, most of which is distro-agnostic or at least easily translated into debian flavors.
> I will say that the Arch wiki page on i3 is a treasure trove of info
I think Arch docs are the best Linux docs I've seen. The FreeBSD manual is the only thing I've seen that's comparable. I've only ever ran Arch for a day or two a few times (no complaints), but Arch docs always deliver for me.
I use i3 on Arch with a custom dmenu (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/dmenu) for opening GUI applications, along with tmux for terminal applications like OP. I also use the included i3bar (http://i3wm.org/i3bar/). i3 documentation is so good it's a joy to configure. I only have few tools, but it gets me wherever I need to go.
I like Debian and wonder if there's a best practise setup for desktop environment plus i3wm. Everyone seems to do something different and the setups I've seen have all had minor quirks (wifi tray icon, sound control, locking, etc).
Currently my main machine is Ubuntu 14.04 with Xcfe and i3wm and I have a few quirks (something about the keyboard charset picker never aligning with the Xcfe tray).