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I don't think this is that silly. For example, tiling window managers scale extremely well all the way from a small netbook with 8 or 9 inches to multiple 27 or 30 inch monitors.

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The problem isn't so much the 8 to 80 inch gap. We've solved that problem. The problem is the 8 to 1 inch gap. Tilling window managers start to fail on smart phone/tablet size screens.

Phones and tablets just run all windows full screen, each on their own workspace. A few let you split the screen in half and run one app each. Sounds like a tiling window manager to me.

A few apps -- on Android anyway -- have a floating mode, where they occupy some space over other apps, always on top. This is another thing tiling window managers do.

Indeed. In fact, that's one of the reasons I switched to Windows Phone 8: It was the closest I could get to the linux+dwm environment where I do most of my computing. Why would anyone want a desktop metaphor on a phone, complete with tiny icons and illegible drop-shadowed text?

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