[sleepinseattle]

> Sway is absolutely incredible, it puts macOS, built by Apple's army of engineers and dump trucks of money to shame in its simplicity, stability, and efficiency.

They have different design goals. A tiling window manager is not a good default for everyone or every device type or screen size.

[yjftsjthsd-h]

> A tiling window manager is not a good default for everyone or every device type or screen size.

I disagree on the point of screen size. On small screens I want every last pixel to count, and tiling and tabs work well for that. On large screens, I find tiling to be a more efficient option than dragging windows around.

That said, available input devices absolutely do make a difference, and that does correlate with screen size.

[willtim]

I could equally state that overlapping windows are not a good default for everyone or every device type. It's also worth pointing out that Apples newest UI, iOS, uses a tiling window manager.

[oblio]

Tiling window managers were tried early on, when PCs were introduced. They failed because normal people didn't like them.

Also, mobile OSes won't really ever have more than 2-3 windows shown at the same time, since the screens are so small. That will probably change once we have folding devices or AR/VR. But super limited "tiling" window managers do make sense with such limited UIs.

[grumpyprole]

> They failed because normal people didn't like them.

Do you have proof of this? I suspect they failed because everyone decided to copy the Mac which was trying to emulate a real desktop with bits of paper on it.

> Super limited "tiling" window managers do make sense with such limited UIs.

They also often make sense for complicated UIs, e.g. IDEs such as Visual Studio and browsers such as Firefox, which have docked sidebars and tabs in preference to overlapping windows.

[foldr]

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiling_window_manager#Microsof...:

> The first version (Windows 1.0) featured a tiling window manager, partly because of litigation by Apple claiming ownership of the overlapping window desktop metaphor. But due to complaints, the next version (Windows 2.0) followed the desktop metaphor. All later versions of the operating system stuck to this approach as the default behaviour.

[grumpyprole]

The litigation from Apple came after Microsoft copied the Mac with overlapping windows (as shown elsewhere in Wikipedia), so this article does not appear correct. Windows 1.0 had tiling windows because IIRC, its lead developer, a former Xerox Parc employee, insisted on a tiling window metaphor. Many other multitasking systems of the period were also based on tiling windows. Overlapping windows certainly became the fashion, thanks to Apple, but you haven't proved they failed because users didn't like them.

[oblio]

Tabs are a completely different metaphor to tiles.

[willtim]

They are an example of managing content without overlapping windows. i3, Sway and Xmonad all have good support for them.

[oblio]

True, but Openbox, Fluxbox, etc. support that, without being tiling window managers. Heck, even Windows 10 now has support for window tabs :D