I think he's bang on with his observation that overlapping windows are a relic.
My wife, whose technical level leans her towards wanting to replace her mac mini when a VPN that she'd installed and then disabled left hostile firewall rules in place ("the internet is flaky on this computer"), is jealous of the tiling setup on my desktop (was hyprland; now sway with a custom dwindle layout). I think tiling has an audience beyond nerds, but I think nobody (perhaps with the exception of omarchy) has made a serious attempt at packaging it in a way that's accessible to business/productivity users. KDE's tiling attempts were, at least last time that I checked, somewhat bolted on and half-assed. I wish omarchy success in de-vibing their codebase, but it would be great to have some serious competition in the space.
I hope not. I've tried tiling and I just don't like it. I may be in the minority these days, and it may simply be my forty years of use patterns, but you'll have to take my overlapping windows from my cold, dead hands.
Eh… as someone who agrees, I think overlapping windows are a feature, not a bug. Very often a window is transient, in that it’s something I need to give my attention to and once it’s done, it’s gone. In a naive tiling window manager, all windows have to re-tile themselves while the transient window is open, just to then return to their previous layout once it’s done anyway. The ideal interaction in my opinion is for the transient window to simply be “on top really quick” and I can just alt+tab if I need to see what’s underneath it. The degenerate case tiling proponents always point out is that “what if the window you need is obscured” and tbh I just never have that problem? Between a quick alt+tab, or the win+arrow shortcuts doing “tiling-lite” when I need it, I’ve never thought “gee I wish something would figure out a tile layout for all these windows”.
More generally, tiling is what you want when you have a particular layout you like, each window has a reason for existence, and you want them all open and visible at the same time. That constitutes like, 10% of my time using a computer. Mostly I just want “give me a new window, let me do a thing, then it’s gone”, with said new window occupying 100% of my attention while it’s there. Having to carve out space for it in a tile layout (even if the tiling is automatic) just doesn’t make sense with the way I use my machine.
smallerfish · · focus · HN ↗
My wife, whose technical level leans her towards wanting to replace her mac mini when a VPN that she'd installed and then disabled left hostile firewall rules in place ("the internet is flaky on this computer"), is jealous of the tiling setup on my desktop (was hyprland; now sway with a custom dwindle layout). I think tiling has an audience beyond nerds, but I think nobody (perhaps with the exception of omarchy) has made a serious attempt at packaging it in a way that's accessible to business/productivity users. KDE's tiling attempts were, at least last time that I checked, somewhat bolted on and half-assed. I wish omarchy success in de-vibing their codebase, but it would be great to have some serious competition in the space.
technothrasher · · focus · HN ↗
I hope not. I've tried tiling and I just don't like it. I may be in the minority these days, and it may simply be my forty years of use patterns, but you'll have to take my overlapping windows from my cold, dead hands.
antonvs · · focus · HN ↗
> it may simply be my forty years of use patterns
Those two statements are perfectly consistent with each other.
ninkendo · · focus · HN ↗
More generally, tiling is what you want when you have a particular layout you like, each window has a reason for existence, and you want them all open and visible at the same time. That constitutes like, 10% of my time using a computer. Mostly I just want “give me a new window, let me do a thing, then it’s gone”, with said new window occupying 100% of my attention while it’s there. Having to carve out space for it in a tile layout (even if the tiling is automatic) just doesn’t make sense with the way I use my machine.
antonvs · · focus · HN ↗
> In a naive tiling window manager
Ok, so you're arguing with a straw man. Do you have a point worth trying to understand?
ninkendo · · focus · HN ↗