Ever use a 'window manager', particularly tiling, rather than a full 'desktop' or 'display manager'? I've had the opposite experience, i3 and now sway have made macOS & Windows clunky and unusable nightmares to me - even talking strictly just about interface/windowing/interaction.

I have and I’ve never been able to understand tiling WMs. After using nontiling ( I don’t know the term) window managers since Windows 95 my mind is just trained for that sort of window management, anything else feels wrong and frustrating.

It’s not for a lack of trying either, I really have tried to like tiling wms.

I've used tiling window managers before, but I don't really find them to be that big of a productivity boost. I have two monitors and I prefer to have all my windows maximized. The only splitting that I need is in my text editor.

The one thing I do like is the command line - I find that to be a much better experience than power shell or cmd. But that is it. If I want to do anything creative that isn't text based it feels flatly inferior. But your mileage may vary based on what you like to do.

I love it in a server, I just don't like linux on the desktop.

I'm not one to make 'productivity' claims about tiling wms. I'm certainly more productive in one, but that's because that's what I'm used to. (Maybe a little bit because it's an innate preference too, but not even sure of that.)

I just find it less frustrating and more organised looking than overlapping windows, swiping between desktops (or it being animated, or somehow slow even with animations turned off).

Basically I just meant I don't think I'd like the Gnome/Xfce/whatever Linux desktop experience either - it would have all the same things that frustrate me on macOS/Windows, and I expect I would agree it's inferior to those (with their massive budgets, UX staff count and salary alone probably dwarfing the Linux OSS projects - not a criticism of them or their efforts).

I’ve tried it before: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Linux with X and regular as well as tiling WMs. In the end I found no productive advantage to just using Rectangle [1] and LaunchBar [2] on macOS. The system mostly works and enables access to all the Unix software I need. Most of the time I just need a shell, tmux and a web browser.

The ongoing fiddling around – to this day – with a substandard experience regarding battery life, WiFi performance and GPU issues as well as HiDPI especially on laptops is a dealbreaker for me.

But then again, that may be a major purpose of desktop Unix, Linux especially: to enable those who see fiddling around (read: hacking) as an end in itself. After all, a dedicated car mechanic will never be truly happy driving a Toyota.

[1]: https://rectangleapp.com/

[2]: https://obdev.at/products/launchbar/index.html