Thanks to the Gnome 3 / Unity / Ubuntu fiasco years back, I started using tiling window managers and never looked back. I might have kept on using Gnome 2 happily but the intrusive changes made me look for alternatives.

The desktop metaphor and floating windows might make sense for casual computer users (mostly because they're used to it) but for programmers and power users it's just not a very good setup.

fwiw. I have used awesome, dwm and now bspwm.

I think this is remnants of the Windows/MacOS holy wars that keep people focused on the wrong things, while making the interesting approaches seem scary.

Talking about the differences between “traditional” desktop environments seems mindless to me, while introducing newcomers to tiling WMs is refreshing and fun.

Funny thing is that the original Xerox UI would tile by default (but the windows were floating). Similarly Windows 1.0 were all tiles.

And to some degree Windows 10 has gone back to tiling.

You can drag windows top corners and the left and right edges to have the take up a fixed part of the screen. Sadly only when using the left/right split will Windows try to auto-resize the opposite window in response to you actions.