I agree to an extent. Very often people/users ask for things based on what they know because it's hard to imagine what they need. Solving that's really the essence of UX/product management. I don't think a tiling DE is what is needed. Based on my experience, there are some core issues to resolve here:
* The notion of a running apps area (dock, taskbar) seems to be essential for users.
* Users (myself and people I know) typically have one application maximized at a time. The exception would be when cross-app interaction is required (drag and drop) or when it really makes sense to have multiple apps visible at once (terminal + editor).
* When users have multiple apps open, there's typically a pattern to how they accomplish this.
* Virtual desktops are hard. You have to dedicate congition/memory to what is running on which desktop.
* Most users don't want to spend hours learning+editing config files to get something basic working (i.e. the article is definitely correct about having a DE vs WM here).
I consider something along the lines of this to solve all the above:
* Typical DE goodies.
* An infinite canvas, not virtual desktops.
* Presets for window placement, i.e. fancy zones[1] that can be placed anywhere on the infinite canvas.
* The camera (current view rectangle) can be translated and scaled/zoomed. Zooming would effectively be alt+tab.
* Camera position presets - these would be analogous to virtual desktops. They can be any shape or size, and can overlap. The idea here is that you could have one camera focusing on your editor fancy zone, and another focusing on the editor+terminal.
* The notion of a running apps area (dock, taskbar) seems to be essential for users.
* Users (myself and people I know) typically have one application maximized at a time. The exception would be when cross-app interaction is required (drag and drop) or when it really makes sense to have multiple apps visible at once (terminal + editor).
* When users have multiple apps open, there's typically a pattern to how they accomplish this.
* Virtual desktops are hard. You have to dedicate congition/memory to what is running on which desktop.
* Most users don't want to spend hours learning+editing config files to get something basic working (i.e. the article is definitely correct about having a DE vs WM here).
I consider something along the lines of this to solve all the above:
* Typical DE goodies.
* An infinite canvas, not virtual desktops.
* Presets for window placement, i.e. fancy zones[1] that can be placed anywhere on the infinite canvas.
* The camera (current view rectangle) can be translated and scaled/zoomed. Zooming would effectively be alt+tab.
* Camera position presets - these would be analogous to virtual desktops. They can be any shape or size, and can overlap. The idea here is that you could have one camera focusing on your editor fancy zone, and another focusing on the editor+terminal.
[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon...