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

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.

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.

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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’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

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’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.

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

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 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.