In real life, in the probably hundreds of developers and IT professionals I've worked with, I've met exactly one who was actually using a tiling window manager.
It was different enough to be a thing we playfully argued about often.
Good window management is a niche skill (on the user side). I often see "normies" waste so much time tabbing between windows or turning their heads between monitors or whatnot. When I want stuff side by side, I press a hotkey to arrange stuff side by side. My WM has a bunch of tags (virtual desktops on steroids), where each tag has its own purpose and a dedicated default layout (tiled for terminals, fullscreen for a browser, etc).
I feel like "tiled vs non-tiled" is a false dichotomy. It's tiled and floating and full screen and spiraling and horizontal split and vertical split, etc.
Absolutely agree. Use what works, and we should always be grateful to have good options.
However there's a lot to most of the tiling window managers that never clicked for me. I've always assumed it's a personal problem. Perhaps I have spent an unreasonable amount of time thinking about "why not?"
I'm not good at remembering keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl+Z seems to be all I need.
I've tried sorting and categorizing apps into tags, but it makes me slower. If apps open on a virtual desktop that I couldn't see, I'd just lose it. If I can't see something it stops existing pretty quickly, which makes even too many virtual desktops a losing battle.
Inconsistent behaviour will always pull me out of whatever I'm doing. 4 apps tiled, 5th app opens in a floating window, now I'm distracted.
For now I use a single 4K monitor at 100% scaling with a couple of virtual desktops. Current task(s) and background apps.
I haven't spent much time managing windows since. Once the windows are open for the day, that's a solved problem. Memory is cheap. Windows mostly open where I left them last time.
There's a certain cognitive load to keeping all of that straight. The computer is supposed to do the thinking and apparently I can't.
Awesome is very appropriately named. (I presume you're using awesome because of the combo of tags and layouts is something I've only encountered there)
I actually have a configuration where I use it as window manager for KDE, to get most of the best of two worlds (awesome is my favourite window manager and KDE is a desktop environment I'm quite fond of).
> In real life, in the probably hundreds of developers and IT professionals I've worked with, I've met exactly one who was actually using a tiling window manager.
I've yet to have a job that actually allowed me to use the tiling WM of my choice (AwesomeWM). Most professional developers who love WMs simply cannot use it for work!
I don't think many of the folks you refer to with cut their teeth on anything but Windows or Mac windowing environments.
I started my serious interactions with graphical computing in a debate about twm vs. vtwm vs. tvtwm vs. ctwm and what-not in the late 80s, early 90s. How do I want my applications arranged? Spatially? or by topic? Do I want indicators like "You have mail!" to be glued to my viewport, or in a particular virtual or topical location? blah blah blah.
You can make a case that it was time wasted to think about those things. But the folks who grew in MS Windows feel to me like a crowd unaware that they're wearing manacles, "unable to imagine" why someone would want to take them off.
I don't know how to succinctly communicate how much mental effort is consumed just arranging displays, on the occasions I need to work in a more mainstream windowing environment. It's a mental tax, and you're just used to paying it.
> But the folks who grew in MS Windows feel to me like a crowd unaware that they're wearing manacles, "unable to imagine" why someone would want to take them off.
This is interesting to me. I am on the other side, and ISTM that the tiling WM folks are the camp you describe.
Windows (2.01) was the 3rd GUI I learned. First was classic MacOS (System 6 and early System 7.0), then Acorn RISC OS on my own home computer, then Windows.
Both MacOS and RISC OS have beautiful, very mouse-centric GUIs where you must use the mouse for most things. Windows was fascinating because it has rich, well-thought-out, rational and consistent keyboard controls, and they work everywhere. In all graphical apps, in the window manager itself, and on the command line.
-- Ctrl + a letter is a discrete action: do this thing now.
-- Alt + a letter opens a menu
-- Shift moves selects in a continuous range: shift+cursors selects text or files in a file manager. Shift+mouse selects multiple icons in a block in a file manager.
-- These can be combined: shift-select a block, then press ctrl as well to add some discontinuous entries.
-- Ctrl + cursor keys moves a word at a time (discontinuous cursor movement).
-- Shift + ctrl selects a word at a time.
In the mid-'90s Linux made Unix affordable and I got to know it, and I switched to it early '00s.
But it lacks that overall cohesive keyboard UI. Some desktops implement most of Windows' keyboard UI (Xfce, LXDE, GNOME 2.x), some invent their own (KDE), many don't have one.
The shell and editors don't have any consistency. Each editor has its own set of keyboard controls, and some environments honour some of them -- but not many because the keyboard controls for an editor make little sense in a window manager. What does "insert mode" mean in a file manager?
They are keyboard-driven windowing environments built by people who live in terminals and only know the extremely limited keyboard controls of the most primitive extant shell environment, one that doesn't honour GUI keyboard UI because it predates it and so in which every app invents its own.
Whereas Windows co-evolved with IBM CUA and deeply embeds it.
The result is that all the Linux tiling WMs I've tried annoy me, because they don't respect the existing Windows-based keystrokes for manipulating windows. GNOME >=3 mostly doesn't either: keystrokes for menu manipulation make little sense when you've tried to eliminate menus from your UI.
Even the growing-in-trendiness MiracleWM because the developer doesn't use plain Ubuntu, he uses Kubuntu, and Kubuntu doesn't respect basic Ubuntu keystrokes like Ctrl+Alt+T for a terminal, so neither does MiracleWM.
They are multiple non-overlapping, non-cohesive, non-uniform keyboard UIs designed by and for people who never knew how to use a keyboard-driven whole-OS UI because they didn't know there was one. So they all built their own ones without knowing that there's 30+ years of prior art for this.
All these little half-thought-out attempts to build something that already existed but its creators didn't know about it.
To extend the prisoners-escaping-jail theme:
Each only extends the one prisoner cell that inmate knew before they got out, where the prison cell is an app -- often a text editor but sometimes it's one game.
One environment lets you navigate by only going left or straight. To go right, turn left three times! Simple!
One only lets you navigate in spirals, but you can adjust the size, and toggle clockwise or anticlockwise.
One is like Asteroids: you pivot your cursor and apply thrust.
One uses Doom/Quake-style WASD + mouse, because everyone knows that, right? It's the standard!
One expects you to plug in a joypad controller and use that.
I've met a handful, certainly a sizable portion of those who ran Linux on their work machines. Notably i3 and Sway I've spotted during demos from extremely talented engineers. Anecdotes to be sure.
It was different enough to be a thing we playfully argued about often.