Precisely the reason I stay on window managers with reasonable defaults.
As long as you donāt change your WM every other month the defaults donāt matter that much IMO. Then again I use a heavily customized dwm myself so obviously Iām team customizationā¦
Yeah, if you stick with one wm, you only have to set it up once since you can just save a backup of the config file(s) somewhere else (like a drive) and then use these files again when you e.g. switch distro for some reason or get a new device. This is something I canāt say is true for a DE in my experience 
I think it might be possible for a DE as well, but not even nearly as easily as for a WM (I have no facts supporting this, these are just my thoughts) (going a bit off topic here)
I have all my ādotfilesā in a git repository using a technique based on this: Ask HN: What do you use to manage dotfiles? | Hacker News
You just have to be careful if some of those files contain secrets, you donāt want that on a public githubā¦
I guess it is possible for DEās as well then? I mean, there has to be some file with the information where I have my panels, for example. Either way, WMs are a lot lighter than DEs, and the lighter, the better IMO 
Also, thanks for telling me, I think I will do that as well 
Arenāt DEs effectively just a suite of applications containing a WM, file explorer, editors, login manager etcā¦?
I think the big issue with something like Gnome is that they use a registry-style database (GConf/GSettings) which may be a bit harder to version well since I believe itās all backed by binary files and not text. I have very little knowledge about it though, so maybe itās not as difficult as I think it is. Also Gnome likes to break stuff every other year for any reason or no reason and I donāt understand why anybody would waste time using this poor, glitchy copy of MacOS that treats its users like complete idiots.
I havenāt used KDE in like 20 years so I donāt know how it handles this stuff. I seem to recall that it was a lot more reasonable than bloody Gnome at least.
I personally always used xfce, so I canāt say anything about kde, gnome and the like, but I think xfce would be easier since it is relatively light
Yeah itās very possible. At any rate Iām sure there must be a way to dump and restore configs from these databases/daemons but I never looked into it.
I almost have not modified the defaults and when swapping to a distro that ships with a DE temporarily I realised that awesomewm defaults with a few modifications is a better experience than a DE. Dynamic tiling WM >>>> all other GUIs
Iām happy with my NixOS+KDE setup.
Relevant NixOS config:
fonts.packages = [
pkgs.dejavu_fonts
pkgs.overpass
pkgs.font-awesome
pkgs.unifont
pkgs.noto-fonts-cjk
pkgs.noto-fonts-emoji
];
i18n.inputMethod = {
enabled = "fcitx5";
fcitx5.addons = with pkgs; [
fcitx5-mozc
fcitx5-gtk
];
};
services.xserver.displayManager.sddm.enable = true;
services.xserver.desktopManager.plasma5.enable = true;
I use stock GNOME on Fedora and Ubuntu and it works well enough. I used to play around with window managers, but I find itās easier to solve problems and get set up on a new machine when Iām just using the defaults.
I donāt have any problems setting a different keyboard layout in GNOME, for instance, though Iām sure there are some other customization options that Iām missing out on by using the defaults.
So, my problem has been solved, but I think it would also be nice if we gathered a list of recommended IMEs for different DEs/WMs and X11 vs. Wayland, since there are quite a lot possibilities? Or isnāt it that big of a difference? Just my thoughts since there seem to be quite a lot Linuxers here
Having opinionated defaults is not why I have a problem with Gnome, my issue is their habit to just make it impossible to do some things that were possible before because They Know Better. The defaults are not just the defaults, theyāre the way youāre supposed to work and if you want to tweak even basic behaviour you often have to resort to more-or-less obscure, unsupported tools that can break after every upgrade.
Like last time I had to install Gnome it was for a workstation for a client, and you had to tinker with gsettings on the command line to enable files and shortcuts on the desktop or use a third party tool that manages these options.
You know, files on the desktop? That thing that has been standard on the vast majority of windowing environments since the Xerox Star in 1981? The first place any user not familiar with Linux and who uses it twice a year is going to look for the shortcut to launch my program?
I donāt even mind that they decided to disable it. Again, I donāt mind opinionated defaults, experimentation and āthinking outside the boxā (I mean, I use a tiling WM after allā¦) but the absolute hubris of not having an easily accessible toggle in the settings to turn it back on is pure Gnome brainworms.
Iām not always a fan of Torvaldās rants but I think he hit the nail on the heard regarding Gnome:
End result: extensions.gnome.org may be a really cool idea, but it seems to have some serious usability problems in practice. And the whole gnome3 approach of āby default we donāt give you even the most basic tools to fix things, but you can hack around things with unofficial extensionsā seems to be a total UX (user experience design) failure.
[ā¦]
And what irritates me is how the gnome3 fanboys (and more importantly, developers), seem to never acknowledge that different people have different tastes. The whole āwe know bestā thing is a disease.
IDEs or IMEs? For the latter the Arch wiki has a fairly extensive table:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Input_method#List_of_available_input_method_editors
Yeah, sorry, I meant IMEs My brain is a bit fried today. Well, I guess we only need that link then, thanks
I first set up a Japanese IME back in like ~2005 when I first tried (and failed) to learn Japanese and back then I used scim-anthy (which I believe is now unmaintained, RIP).
When I resumed/reset my studies in late 2022 I went over this wiki and tried many of the possibilities to find the one that worked best for my baroque environment (no DE, niche WM, Dvorak base layout, need for an additional Russian layout etcā¦) and fcitx5 + mozc just does it all and nothing else came close. I also think it works on Wayland although I have no experience with that. And the configtool is pretty handy and extensive.
So frankly personally I would say that fcitx5+mozc is probably a sane default for most people in the vast majority of environments.
ibus + anthy has been serving me well in Arch for years. Should be pretty WM/DE agnostic. I run i3 but Iāve used it with Gnome too.