Hi there, I come bearing the noob question of the day,
I am currently trying out ubuntu budgie, and I really like budgie, but, I really do not like mutter wm, no offence intended, I rather use something else.
I installed i3wm, so, how can I ‘make’ the bugie desktop to use i3 instead of mutter?
You’ll need to disable mutter and enable i3. This could be as simple as removing mutter from the startup applications and adding i3. I’m not sure though.
OP wants to run a Budgie session but not with the default window manager. That is possible with some DEs but probably not all. I guess Budgie and Gnome 3 would be difficult to “hack”.
I know if you use LXDE, Xfce or LXQt you can change easily the window manager and some of them even support i3.
@dasgeek has a video about i3 running in Xfce, it might give you some ideas.