Well, keep in mind that based on the author's "street cred", they are only 20. I think many of us would agree that when we were 20 our tolerance for all sorts of tinkering and BS in software was almost infinite compared to what it became after several years in the workforce or having a family.

I only bring this up because I have seen a dozen or more tiling WMs come and go over the past 20 years, many of which were touted as being "the future." The reality is that the most productivity-enhancing features from tiling WMs were integrated into all the major window managers ages ago, and pure tiling WMs will forever be a niche product.

That means to use them effectively you're going to need to invest a lot of time and effort for realistically incremental gains in productivity, and in return you get the side effect of niche products like these having a lots of rough edges.

I was likewise. And I found that my workflow was very compatible with tiling window managers. I used splits for temporary apps (like a 30 sec diversion into a terminal) but otherwise dedicated an entire workspace/screen to each app. It's a marginal improvement over Gnome, things are more likely to be in the right place out-of-the-gate (and, honestly, how often do you actually need to z-stack windows?).

I initially thought that an even better WM would be in the realm of an real-time strategy game camera: an infinite 2D canvas with "keybindable" locations+zooms. Niri has convinced me that my idea was too complicated, and it hits the perfect spot between functionality and usability.

It's like technology gifted to us by aliens from the future.

I think that's how most people work. I watched a colleague use his MacBook for react dev and all of his windows were just...like whatever size and position they opened at, but never full screen? My 3 monitor brain couldn't compute lol.

I have a laptop, 24" centered horizontal centered and a 24" vertical monitor and do a vertical half split for Spotify/teams/shell/outlook, with docs on the laptop screen and ide on the main window full screen. And virtual desktops for design/research, dev and personal.

Sticking with the standard monitor sizes instead of 4k or ultrawide makes screen sharing way simpler as well!

Small gripe, Modern UI design with 10px of padding around everything means most apps and pages HAVE to be full screen to get anything done.

This is me exactly haha. What I really want is just gnome with a little more tiling capability for the rare occasion, like thirds and quarters. But the majority of my tiling needs are in the terminal and tmux is the hero

I think, some of you will love this extension.

https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/4548/tactile/

I am an i3 convert, but I feel this is very useful, if you don't want a full-blown tiling extension, but want some of the convenience of tiling, this is such a simple solution!

Same, rarely maybe quarters too.

Perhaps the biggest usage difference I'll make switching between a floating and tiling window manager is how I swap windows in those positions. In the tiling case I'll create tabbed containers and position the container tiles accordingly. Then any time I want to switch it's selecting a tab in the container. In the floating use case I just switch and position individually. Most of the time the tabbed container is the easier workflow, rarely the floating one can be a better fit - just depends on what exactly I'm doing at the time.

Overall the difference is relatively tiny and what I really end up wanting to get close to regardless of the tools I'm using is something like that Windows 10 beta period where you could put different applications as tabs in the same window, have the workspace/zone based tiling gestures + shortcuts, but have new things just default to floating windows until I assign them.

In the end... so long as I can position the window somewhere within 2 seconds it really doesn't matter much.

I used to do that when I had a two-monitor setup - one full-screen window per monitor. Now that I have one 4K monitor I usually have two windows side by side, and very occasionally quartered (sometimes of course also one window on one side and two on the other). Not sure if this "workflow" would lend itself to a tiling window manager (never tried one), because some of the windows are also stacked?

I'll occasionally do quarters. Especially half on one side, two quarter-windows on the other, for a 3-window arrangement. On Mac.

My key bindings are a little different because I use the defaults in Spectacle to do it. More than a decade like that. Program's discontinued but still works and has never given me so much as one problem this entire time, so I'm going to keep using it until it stops working.

I use a similar setup on KDE. I generally let windows float, but do half/half or quarters when I need a "command deck" for working on a something.

That thing works for me. Horses for courses, YMMV.

If that's being a cavemen, I'm a proud one at that.

This is how I use my Mac desktop with Rectangle https://rectangleapp.com

That and the apple touchpad to swipe three fingers left and right to switch desktops (and different machines as one desktop is remote desked into a windows box and another terminal+tmux session to a linux box).

I do this, but on KDE. Occasionally, I need four horizontal windows since I'm on an ultrawide, so I use the built-in KWin tiling (https://planet.kde.org/marco-martin-2022-10-31-kwin-and-tili...).

I've been using Tiling Shell extension with gnome. https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/7065/tiling-shell/

I really love it so far.

Me too. For most things I want all the screen space for the one thing I'm working on. Occasionally I need to look at two things. I almost never need to look at more than two things and I don't have a 100" screen anyway so there wouldn't be space.

I must also be a caveman, I have at most 4 windows open, they are pretty much full screen, and I swap between them with a mouse. I don't even have that many browser tabs open at any given time, maybe 5-10 max. I feel old when I see kids these days using fancy window managers with custom ergo keyboards and no mice, while they hack away in neovim (is that still cool?) and chat on a platform I don't even know exists yet.

Depends. Do you use 49" 3.5:1 ultra wide screen, or a 24" 4:3? If the latter, probably not. If the former, there should be questions. Potentially lots of questions.

No. You are the everlasting present, i.e. the future.

I use this too, the keybinds carry to windows which is very convenient. I get stunlocked by muscle memory when working in macos tho.

If Gnome was a browser, it would have no tabs.

I use quarter windows ar best. Just like many others by the looks of it.

Same.

I only use tiling on my 21:9 display.