You don’t really need to use a tiling window. You can still use a floating window manager and learn Linux stuff.On my Guix system, I had River setup with Waybar, Rofi and Rivertile, with other utilities like WirePlumber, brightnessctl, etc and I didnt really enjoy the experience. Sure, I could have spent some more time on improving that, but I thought that it was pointless having dotfiles next to my scheme config, so I went back to GNOME Shell.
Interesting point, so because Guix “forces” you to declare you OS you rather skipped on the option of having dotfiles? Not sure I can fully follow that train of thought. Esp. when it comes to GNOME being used instead. Can you shed more light on what made you switch?