Personally, I've bailed on the whole DE thing. Take the tiling-wm-pill and move on. Now I have to deal with tumblerd random high-cpu usages and thunar's unexpected crashes.
I would use a tiling window manager (and have) on something like a chromebook or if I'm a youtuber that does everything in a VM at 1080p. I have a hybrid approach that I use with XFCE (aggressive window snapping with custom shortcuts), but it's hardly a typical tiling window manager experience.
Regarding Thunar, I don't have any issues, but if you are not using it in XFCE, you might want to try and see what plugins you are loading. Some expect XFCE and could be the root of your issues.
I'm using i3 / sway on both, my Workstation's 40" 21:9 (5120x2160) and my private 32" 16:9 4K displays, and see no reason why a bigger display, or one with a higher DPI, would make using a tiling window manager working worse, on the contrary, for me, it's all the more important to have good management if I got more "screen estate" to handle.
IME using tiling WMs on bigger/HiDPI screens is a fantastic experience.
i also run sway on my 14” laptop simply because i share my OS config between the two machines. i like its workspaces and notifications and being able to tweak `waybar` exactly how i want it, but the actual tiling functionality is pretty useless. at _most_ i’ll do two panes per workspace — at which point you’re in territory any DWM would do well in.
But usually one would need another terminal window by the side of it and that's when I get rid of the gaps.
For example, I most of the time use the following layout at work:
Workspace #1: Split into two stacked sides:
- on the left there's firefox open (sometimes two windows to
group tabs)
- on the right there's my mailer (thunderbird but I dabbled
with neomutt/notmuch too)
- either side holds an occasional shell for some local or remote
maintenance, quick calculation or doing something else
(note I recently switched workstation and while at it I tried to switch from i3 to sway, so the top bar config is really plain due to me having yet to find some time to port over my old i3bar one to waybar or the like)
Workspace #2: A single big tabbed assembly of terminal windows.
Each connects to a development VM (different projects and or major
releases, using Proxmox VE makes managing those VMs quite easy)
via SSH, in there I'm running tmux with a small screen part for a
shell on the left side and the remaining part for vim with split
panes on the right side
Further workspaces are then for ssh windows for more complex real tests on some servers.
I use a lot of short-lived windows for terminal, browser, pdf-reader, ... and there the tiling window manager really shines, as I can effortless open those in some tens of milliseconds (MOD+Enter for terminals, MOD+D for my general window launcher), check what I need, maybe copy some text to the primary buffer by simply selecting it and then close it again With CTRL+D (EOF) for terminals or MOD+SHIFT+Q for any window.
I do this. How is it a bad experience? If anything I get more mileage out of my tiling WM on my large screen than I do on my laptop, where I tend to just use a lot of full screen apps and change tag/workspace a lot.
But I don’t live in a terminal and/or text editor — my most frequently used programs are IDEs, VCS UIs, and graphics editors… stuff with lots of panes and palettes and such. Simpler apps get use too, but it’s skewed enough that popping some apps into floating mode in a tiling WM isn’t enough. My ideal environment is floating-first with light optional tiling, like macOS with something like Moom installed.
But that doesn't really solve the issue with the file picker...
Also, since a twm is not tied to a DE, you can pick KDE set of apps for example in i3. Then you'd have a file picker with thumbnails.
That said, I do neither of those things and I suffer from this bug. So you are right in a sense.
I am now running a hybrid setup with KDE + i3. It works really well because I get to have all my network settings, display settings, etc on the fly, I can use konqueror, and i still get i3 nicely.