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.
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.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/i3