Linux

Main reason for me is because I don’t have to manage the position or size of apps I open.

Web dev here.

• editor + web browser + devtools when working on frontend (workspace 3)
• editor + tests + another terminal for whatever when working backend (workspace 2)
• server terminal + lazydocker for both (workspace 1)
• web browser with work related tabs + todo list + notes app on workspace 9
• chat apps and email on workspace 10
• long-running jobs and performance monitors on workspace 8
• 4-7 are used for whatever
• music on scratchpad

Tiling (as well as stacking) make it manageable to have a bunch of windows open with a minimum of fuckery. Sure I can only read one at a time, but when coding for example I'm rapidly switching between the code and the result. I can have a text editor, browser, and devtools accessible as fast as I can think, and I spend very little effort arranging windows.

Also, a good tiling window manager replaces the need to learn a bunch of windowing features for other apps. My devtools open in a new window, I don't use tmux or my terminal's split features, and I generally have a bunch of browser instances open because my window management handles it all, better.

The main reason I use a tiling WM is because I grew tired of having to drag my mouse all over the screen to switch maximised windows, cycling through them with hotkeys or, even worse, spending a fat minute resizing windows with surgical precision in order to have them both visible.

At first I used KDE's ability to make them transparent, which was ok enough until I tried experimenting with Sway; now I have the habit of splitting the workspace in two, and swiftly resizing the window I want my focus on.
In certain situations floating windows are more convenient, so I just Meta+F, make it a bit transparent, then drag it around.

If I really do not need nor want anything else on screen, Alt+Enter forces the window to its size, and if I want to look at the time or smth I have 9 other workspaces to switch to without any delay.

The downside of tiling WMs is that no desktop PC software developer considers their existence, and most applications don't like being forcefully resized.
Also, popups often take half the screen - I can't even blame anyone, portable graphical libraries and frameworks do not expect that popups need special treatment for the WM to display them correctly.

It's basically the same as a stacking WM, except you can't lose windows under others. And it automates the window handling with freely sizeable ones like terminals, not hiding them on top of each other, while eg. Steam can get its own Workspace.

Don't need the mouse. Nothing ever gets tucked behind anything else. dwm allows you to put one window on multiple tags (desktops) in multiple window arrangements. Also it's fully scriptable. Why NOT use a tiling WM?

I prefer a tiling WM for programming work. On my personal PC I actually use GNOME or KDE or something. But on my old study machine and my current work machines it's i3 all the way. Being able to quickly tile 4 terminals together makes my work much easier. Often I have many terminals open, each with a bash history specific to what I'm doing there. Workspaces then act as a sort of bundle of applications with the same general purpose. For instance, one workspace for installing and copying stuff to a machine, another for VNC related stuff, etc. If I'd have to alt+tab between 8 terminals I'd never know which one is which. But now I can remember them by location which is way easier mentally. Similarly I sometimes have multiple projects open in an IDE, and I usually remember which workspace is for which project.

It's even better on 4K monitors, where having 4 1080p terminals open is amazing. I can see everything and I only need to move my eyes. No keypress to switch terminal, everything is right there.

I've configured my entire interface to provide the most amount of input bandwidth for me so that I never have to wait for the computer to do what I want. I3 vim and vimmium solve my problems

Even on Windows I've always used a "split" desktop. Windows has pretty okay tiling features (for the drag-and-drop folks). I found it pretty efficient being able to look at two browser tab windows or having a PDF file on one side and Word/Docs on the other.

When I was venturing into Linux and found out about i3wm, I pretty much fell in love. It does the same tiling thing on Windows but better. Now I can have four windows without it feeling too cramped and it's reallly easy to move around with workspaces. I think it's really great for students and researchers.

I tend to use floating or fullscreen for general browsing but often you have to type something while frequently referring back to something else - for example when programming I will be looking at the documentation. Or maybe debugging something on the command line while looking at your code to see what's going on. In those circumstances tilling is perfect.

I really enjoy it because everything is automatically maximized, but I can always easily put programs next to each other (f.e. my school uses Discord, so I have to have it open next to Matrix). The window rules are also very useful, as I can make Firefox always be on the first workspace, or my terminal always on the third. You can also make certain apps always float so password managers and such still work the same way.

Usually it's just one program per virtual desktop, and maybe a second (briefly) for one-off terminal commands, etc.

The whole point for me is to avoid wasting time moving a mouse around or manually manipulating anything.

I don't use an exclusive tiling WM, but prefer a hybrid stacked/tiled approach.

So my argument for the stacked approach (or why I prefer floating windows sometimes) is because sometimes, some of my windows don't really work well as a small tiled space - remote desktop windows for instance. Or sometimes, there's too much white space in a window and resizing it into a tile may make it look weird, like a web page (especially web apps). So tiling doesn't always work for me, so for the most part I prefer floating/stacked windows.

As for tiling, it's great when you've got multiple things you need to refer to, or keep an eye out on. For instance, in my typical tiled work setup, I would have one tile for emails, one for chat, one for my browser, and one is a terminal or IDE. The terminal or IDE would be my main work area, I need the browser open at the same time to look at help or other reference material and maybe copy-paste code, and the emails and chat I need them open to keep an eye on things. I might make use of other monitors or workspaces for other things, like full-screen windows such as remote desktop sessions, or other monitoring stuff.

So for me, both floating and tiling windows are useful, so I prefer a general stacked WM that can also do tiling.

I'm using tiling WM mostly to have shortcuts and more controls about window switching but I rarely have multiple windows visible at once, but when I do - tiling is more convenient. When it doesn't - you can always make that particular window floating.

I have to bounce between documents, emails, and text editing all day. Everybody processes information in their own way, but for me the learning curve for a tiling WM was only a few minutes and it made doing my work much easier. I can be looking at 3 or 4 things for a project without tapping a bunch of times and going back and forth. Same goes for bookkeeping and all of the other things that I do that seem to require looking at 4 or 5 things at once.

When I'm outside of my preferred tiling environment (especially on Windows or a Mac), I feel like the window manager is me. I can get by using shortcuts, but I feel like I'm just attempting to approximate a tiling experience while also dealing with a higher cognitive workload moving windows around, zooming out to find something that is open somewhere in the background, remembering whether the file I was looking at was a pdf/jpeg/word document, etc. My tiling workflow really helps me ignore that kind of stuff.

Not needing to search through layers when I’m multitasking is the big thing. Having a file manager, ide and documentation all on one monitor makes things much easier.

I am always creating content on one half of my screen and browsing through documentation or specifications or chat logs on the other half. So it makes sense, and saves me lots of time, if I setup my computer to automatically place certain windows such that they fill the whole left of the screen and other windows so they fill the whole right of the screen. And this is precisely what tiling window managers are designed to do -- especially ones that let you define your own rules about what windows go where.

at some point in my computer life, I realised that with most new window I oppened, I was dragging them to the side to tile them next to the other in order to not lost track of either the content of the other window like a webpage or a running script or to more easily drag stuff between them without having to move the first window, now behind the new one, it wasn't that annoying or time consuming since I'm pretty fast with a mouse, but it did require me to focus on the positioning of the window to get going, tiling completely removed that aspect, no I only interract with the window to resize them or change screen, which is far less often that I use to move them around to un-obstruct them

I'm with you. My eyes can only look one place at a time, I don't even understand the draw of multi monitor. Alt-tab is your friend.

The only objections to that which I find convincing is the difficulty of managing switching tasks between complex sets of windows and tabs that way. But that just tells me that someone needs to invest in better controls for managing a full-screen switching workflow as a third alternative to tiling vs overlapping.

I don't like it. Changing one element is not supposed to influence all others. I put windows into predefined positions and sizes via hotkeys (and I set a font sizes to get specific line lengths) and I would violently rip every peace of code out of my system, that dares to override my orders.

i don’t like it tbh. I prefer virtual desktops; I could see how a kiosk it might be helpful, where based on streaming data, a controller opens / closes tiles and the Wm makes it work.

For me, diff desktops for diff modes of use that auto start @ login & ability to hotkey across. This was a bigger deal when debugger and editor were separate and starting an app meant clicking and dragging the initial size (who has time for that). :)

Remember: empty RAM is wasted RAM!

The ‘tiling’ in tiling window-managers is only half-truth. It distinguishes them from stacking window-mamagers, which would be equal to only looking at one thing at the time.

They all can also do stacking and tabbing, the term means they can do tiling as well. Most users some form of stacking even more than tiling in itself.

Most also can do floating windows, usually on per-app basis. This is achieving what most fully fledged desktop users do: have one fullscreen window per workspace, and have small things like pacucontrol as small floating window.

In no way are you limited to tiling. If you were, tiling window managers wouldn’t be very popular. They’d be like stacking window managers are today.

My most often use half-and-half layout: browser and emacs, emacs and console, emacs and emacs, and so on. If I want to have two consoles and emacs, I instead of tiling, make a stack for the two consoles. This way I always have emacs showing, and switch between the consoles, no matter how many there are. This is kind of like a “sub-workspace”.

The main advantage is ease of configuration, assuming familiarity with config-files. That enables quick, keyboard based navigation, in a very personal and fine-tuned manner. Modern tiling window-managers can also be configured on trackpad or touchscreen gestures, and work intuitively with mouse pointer. So while many users do specifically keyboard centric configuration, the key point in my opinion is that you as a user need, and get to, choose.

The only thing I tile is windows on the secondary vertical monitor, simple stack of two windows on top of each other. There it works well, as that monitor mostly gets used for monitoring long running processes, webcam for the 3d printer and stuff like that. It's not windows I actively engage with, but just something running at the side to keep an eye on.

For my main monitor I never quite saw the point. I don't like windows being off to the side, creates too much perspective distortion on a big monitor to be comfortable to look at, I like them in the center. When I put a window in the center, there isn't enough space left to the sides to do much useful with, even a simple shell starts line breaking in ugly ways.

I do tile inside Emacs, but even there it's mostly just a simple vertical tile (code at the top, compiler output at the bottom).

In my tilling wm (xmonad and before that ion3) all software is always full screen and I have them in “tabs" per "desktop" aka "tag"'.

It is so nice to have everything available via keyboard, after decade of same setup I don't even think where is what.

And xmonad is soooo good with multiple monitors, nothing comes close.