OS without a DE

> I think a panel and a window manager is a DE
They are not the same thing.
> You could for example not have a panel, but then certain tasks become tedious like observing battery status, change wifi or see the time
You can have a panel without a DE.

Your original question was badly phrased.
Let's assume you meant what the drawbacks of using herbstluftwm over KDE with herbstluftwm.
Obviously both are viable, but there are a ton of things you presumably want that isn't in the window manager.
Stuff like notifications, clipboard managers, sound managers, network managers etc will be things you install desperately. All visible applications are easy to spot which ones you want, but those will be installed manually as well.
The list is too long to write here, so it is faster to just try it in a virtual machine and then take not of what things don't work the way you want them to.

or i3

>viable
depends completely on your prefs

>drawbacks
maybe you don't like keyboard shortcuts

>best WM
install one and use it for two weeks and then you'll know what you personally prefer

That's actually a good idea, I will try some on a virtual machine and see how things go. Shame I didn't think of it before.

I will try i3 and herbstluftwm, but what is your favorite out of curiosity?

I gave you my definition; a DE is a wm + panel.
I say panel as it is shorthand for all the daemons you control with a panel.
A DE is just a term for All things that go into creating the desktop. Given there are so many different desktops out there this seems to fit all of them.
Otherwise, you have to be way too descriptive about what is and isn't a desktop and then it doesn't fit anything but one.
What is your definition?

I'm on XFCE. Have considered bspwm and i3. leaning towards the latter even though they've adapted the CoCK

A DE goes further. It has system menus, starters, status applets and even drag and drop possibility. In fact, most of them even come with softwares (text editor and file browser).
A panel is just one more building block of a DE, you can't just take it as a define characteristic of it.
Which means that if you say panel + wm = de, i could very well say menus + wm = de with the same logic.
Perhaps you meant that any addon on a wm turns it into a DE, but that's still shady. A DE is much more than just one applet or addon, it's a full kit.

>>drawbacks
>maybe you don't like keyboard shortcuts
If I were to switch to i3, I would rely way more on the mouse than I currently do when I use KDE.
I don't the keyboard vs mouse argument works with a lot of people.
You need more setup than just installing the WM to be able to use the computer 100% from the keyboard.
With a graphical interface, the buttons are meant to pressed with a mouse but that is not how people use a computer.
They grab the mouse, hover button to read the documentation, clicks it and then uses the hotkey or key sequence they just read from then on.
It is meant to teach people to use the application, not keep them from using the keyboard.
Going to another window to look up the online documentation, scroll through hours worth of reading to find something that could be described with 10 characters and proper placement is bad design IMO.
And the navigation being shifted from vim made me uninstall that shit so fast I never bothered to change it. I whish murder and famine to the developer who thought that was a good idea.

KDE doesn't even include their text editor by default anymore. I don't think this is a good measure. Uninstalling one application doesn't make it "not a DE" how many you need to uninstall is not really an argument I find exciting.
Nobody uses a computer without applications. If you use ls instead of a file manager to manage your files, you are just using a bad file manager.
If you solve the same roles a DE solves with other tools, you just have a different DE.
>it's a full kit
Sure, that is why I said panel as it is a bunch of tools that you need outside of the panel to have that available.
I use a panel for is managing networks, battery monitoring, sound management, notifications and observing which window is active.
Those things are what I consider essential to a panel I would use.
It gives me a way to interact with the computer as it were a literal desk with some buttons and meters to display stuff for me.
Remove a button and it is still a desk.
Put something different in it, still a desk.
Create a panel with no buttons and just print something from /proc/, still a desk.
Is one thing lighter than the other? Sure.
But most people tend to create something that is very close to what a regular DE offers in terms of usability.

Obviously a margarita is not the same as a meatlovers pizza, but they are both a pizza.

wmutils, it splits the functions of a regular wm into multiple dedicated tools that you can glue together with scripts to do whatever you want.