Something I realized after spending a few months in sway (i3) and then niri is that I only care about a few windows (code editor, terminal, browser, apps I use moment to moment).

All the rest I'd prefer to just summon as-needed and then dismiss without navigating away from the windows I care about.

sway/niri want me to tile every window into some top-level spot.

Took me a while to admit it, but the usual Windows/macOS/DE "stacking" method is what I want + a few hotkeys to arrange the few windows I care about.

I’m currently using Krohnkite [1] to get dynamic tiling in KDE, and Klassy [2] to get i3wm-like pixel borders instead of full window decorations.

[1]: https://github.com/esjeon/krohnkite [2]: https://github.com/paulmcauley/klassy