I think stacking windows looks better, makes for a cool screenshot when trying to sell the thing. But tiling windows are more ergonomic for actually using the infernal machine.<p>For me the revelation was that I have never said "Oh boy I sure am glad this window partially overlaps this other window" I either want one full screen windows or a few windows side by side. Why do I have to handle this myself? and went to the dark side, a tiling window manager. To the point that it really chafes now when I use stacking windows, It feels like I spend most of the time shuffling windows around.<p>To ease the overlapping window pain many linux window managers have a feature where the focused window does not have to be the top window and this makes things a lot better, you can be looking at the top window and typing/clicking on the partially obscured bottom window.
The primary value of overlapping windows is spacial memory: you remember where a given window is positioned on a 2D surface. The moment I grasped this I had the “oh boy I sure am glad this window partially overlaps this other window.”<p>(At one moment, I used to work on a single desktop with around 20 windows, no dock, just windows, on my 14in MacBook with 125% DPI. Too much but possible. Now I keep only 6-7 windows.)<p>This is not to say that dynamic window management is worse. Far from it. But it excels at this: dynamic, rapidly changing environments, where at almost any given moment something is either opening or closing. This is usually the case with specialized programs like web browsers or IDE, but not with the main system WM.<p>The main problem is that overlapping windows and automatic window management are incompatible. The former assumes that user sets the dimensions and is always right, which makes the latter powerless to follow any meaningful algorithm. To give an example, if you manage your windows with a dock and “maximize” button, they’d break overlapping patterns.<p>> I either want one full screen windows or a few windows side by side.<p>You’re not wrong to work like this but it may be a byproduct of not fully internalizing the overlapping windows concept.
Focus management is such a tricky beast.
Most of the time, I want the active application window in the middle of the screen, but not necessarily filling the whole screen or the whole height, and also not necessarily centered. The window position and size depends on its contents, what sidebars it has, and so on. This inherently leads to overlapping windows. I use a tool that automatically moves and resizes windows to the application-specific desired position, while also having the ability to arrange a split-screen view using keyboard shortcuts when needed.
To be fair, in the era when resolutions like 512x342 or 640x480 were common overlapped windows were quite useful.