A while back I moved to Arch with Xmonad, dmenu, tmux etc, but for about a year now, my workstation has been the same tools on top of Ubuntu Server. I have an Ansible playbook that I can apply to a fresh install and have almost my whole working environment ready to go - just a few things I haven't got around to including/automating.
The great thing about running this kind of setup is that you need a deeper understanding of Linux to do all the things that you would otherwise rely on a fully-fledged DE to do for you. For me, this has translated into greater fluency on servers, because my daily driver more closely resembles one.
My setup is Ubuntu Budgie and i3 for hardcore sessions, but I also have been using Ansible even for configuring my desktop with great success. It's really convenient when getting new hardware or doing a reinstall.
A while back I moved to Arch with Xmonad, dmenu, tmux etc, but for about a year now, my workstation has been the same tools on top of Ubuntu Server. I have an Ansible playbook that I can apply to a fresh install and have almost my whole working environment ready to go - just a few things I haven't got around to including/automating.
The great thing about running this kind of setup is that you need a deeper understanding of Linux to do all the things that you would otherwise rely on a fully-fledged DE to do for you. For me, this has translated into greater fluency on servers, because my daily driver more closely resembles one.