I used to always bounce back and forth between Gnome, Plasma, Sway and Hyprland.
I love tiling compositors, but I also love having a fully functional desktop without stitching together two dozen different tools and configuring each separately. I got better things to do than edit text files for days.
And I think I found my holy grail: niri with Dank Material Shell.
DMS really is something else. A fully-fledged DE that sits on top of a tiling wayland compositor, with a workflow similar to Gnome and GUI customization options similar to Plasma.
I realize I’m shilling hard here, but I don’t even know the guy who made it. I’m just genuinely floored by the project’s quality.
Niri is awesome, but I cannot stand DMS with how often it completely changes the base setup and breaks my configs. The generated json dotfiles are also a mess, impossible to work with outside of their GUI. My friend tried it and switched to Noctalia, and he’s much happier. I’m probably just going back to Waybar or something simpler, but that’s just personal preference
I followed the same path as OP and your friend in the last week. I settled with Niri and Noctalia and am very happy.