>I think tiling is great for terminals, but not for the whole desktop (I don't want my web browser or video player to be resized because I open a new program).
This, I can't imagine anyone wanting that sort of tiling. Anytime I have a use case for tiling in my own job it ends up being impossible to get things tiled the way I want and also have the things I don't want tiled setup correctly on my other screen.
Years of XMonad use here. Really, it's not the interference you are imagining.
Much of the time I have a web browser using a whole portrait-aligned monitor, but sometimes I feel like having it 2-up in a landscape monitor.
The win of nice clean window separation, without giving up significant percentage of my display space to window decoration, is -profound-.
I have one pixel borders around my shells, and I have it because I fiddled with zero and decided I liked one better. How many pixels do you lose to decoration, so you can mouse over them cleanly? That's a major win.
> The win of nice clean window separation, without giving up significant percentage of my display space to window decoration, is -profound-.
What does this have to do with a tiling window manager? I'd expect the app decides how to display window decoration, not the window manager. In fact I can confirm that right now since Chrome has different window decoration than say TextEdit. Also, scrollbars, macOS has them invisible by default so they don't take any space.
As for 2-up. Both Windows and Mac have shortcuts for that case
You're incorrect: there might be some decoration provided by the app, but there's a layer outside of that which is configured by the window manager. That's the title bar, and the little icons by which you maximize/ minimize/ "Iconify"... do people still do that?..
That's something that's different between X11 and Wayland - in Wayland, windows are responsible for their own decoration (I presume Xwayland handles decoration for X11 windows running through Wayland). This makes it quite a bit harder to hide all decorations on Wayland - various UI toolkits have ways that the end-user can tell them to hide bits, but they all operate differently and don't cover everything.
This, I can't imagine anyone wanting that sort of tiling. Anytime I have a use case for tiling in my own job it ends up being impossible to get things tiled the way I want and also have the things I don't want tiled setup correctly on my other screen.