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.

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.

Because I can maximize the potential of my screen to the max.

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

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.