> With a tiling window manager, every window you open has cognitive overload. Which workspace, which location on screen, is it okay if other windows resize, or do I have it float even? Every tile you add affects the other tiles in some way - at the very least a new tile (e.g. on a new workspace) consumes space that cannot be taken by other tiles. The reward for this additional cognitive load is that every action is concious - reducing a lot of the mess that can pile while using a comptuer. This makes them incredibly suitable for people whose computer use is predictable, organized and focused on quick parallel tasks. I understand why so many developers use them.

This is not true, at least not in i3. When I don't want to think about how to position a new window I can simply switch to tabbed or stack mode, where all windows inside a determined workspace will be "maximized", and I can switch to them by changing the tab (mostly like browsers and web pages). This isn't really much different to Alt-Tabbing, except that I find more efficient (of course, this last part is IMO).

It is true that on my current setup almost all workspaces have a specific usage, however I have a "trash" workspace specially created to put those things that does not make sense in any other workspace. This workspace generally runs in tabbed mode thanks to above.