Problem launching from daemon or emacsclient

I am making the switch from vim to doom so I am a noob, but I can RTFMs, follow directions, watch videos. I am running Arch/i3 on an XPS13. When I launch doom-emacs from the daemon or emacsclient, I lose control of fonts, cursor style and color and other sundry settings in my config.el. I won’t bore you with links to posts, videos, etc. I think I have read and watched them all lol. I do have a basic understanding of why this happens but the workarounds/fixes suggested in the forums do not work for me (in X or Wayland). Does anyone have a reproducible solution to this problem? Seems like this would be something that should have been fixed long ago, so probably it has been and I am just being stupid. Thanks in advance! (Curiously, on my hobby lappy, which is an old Lenovo X1 carbon, running Nixos with flakes and a home-manager module, the problem does not occur.)