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by oblio 2664 days ago
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.
1 comments
grumpyprole 2664 days ago
> 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.

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foldr 2664 days ago
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.

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grumpyprole 2664 days ago
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.
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oblio 2664 days ago
Tabs are a completely different metaphor to tiles.
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willtim 2664 days ago
They are an example of managing content without overlapping windows. i3, Sway and Xmonad all have good support for them.
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oblio 2663 days ago
True, but Openbox, Fluxbox, etc. support that, without being tiling window managers. Heck, even Windows 10 now has support for window tabs :D
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