Hi, new here, but have been reading nixers posts for a while. I have been looking for some in-depth discussions about WMs, and finally I got it here ;)

Many replies have mentioned that a mono application layout turns out to appear most, and that's also my feeling after a ~3 years of pure tiling experience (mainly i3).

Now I am rather convinced that 99% use cases can be covered by a layout no more complex than a 2x2 grid, and complex layouts beyond this are just unnecessary. However this is a biased opinion, as I use only a 14-inch laptop monitor most of times, with an extra 27'' one only occasionally. So I am quite interested about whether people with a large, high resolution screen actually divide their screens in more complex ways...

Another downside of tiling WMs, according to my own observation, is the ignorance of "stacking" or "hiding" of windows. Tiling WMs tend to encourage people to put everything on the screen, which is probably not the best practice. Certainly we have virtual desktops/workspace, but in every WM I have ever seen, they are assigned logical meanings, instead of serving as ad-hoc window containers. For example, when I am developing a C++ program, but has something unsure about the standard, and decided to do some experiments in another test project, it would be weird to put the new project on my "web browsing" or "doc reading" workspace, instead of the "code editing" one, just because my screen can't fit two projects at the same time.

Finally I realized that the essence is that, the windows we want to be "available" are different from the windows we want to be "displayed on screen". Instead of struggling to put everything you need on the screen, convenient methods to hide/show windows and/or simple layout of windows is the right way to go for me.

But one thing I really love about (some) tiling WMs is the way you move the focus. Most stacking WMs and some tiling WMs move focus by some sort of Tab-cycle, but the order is not visible from the visual layout of windows, so you have to switch focus, see which window is focused and then interact, which is slow, considered that moving focus is the most frequent operation when using a WM. But some tiling WMs support moving focus by directions. In this way, where you'll move to is directly visible from what you see , no thinking or interacting is required.