I think the problem is that tiling window managers have never been mainstream, so they are all targeted at people who would go out of there way to install a tiling window manger. By contrast, even non-mainstream composting window managers have the benefit of seeing how the mainstream ones do things to be usable (and have had more effort put into them in general). Another problem is that tiling window managers are (almost?) never part of a complete desktop environment. They may pay lip service to this (in the form of a basic start-menu type thing), but for the most part they are simply window managers. With composting window managers, no one (except the developer) thinks of the WM by itself.

> a complete desktop environment

I agree. I wish more Tiling WMs came with a GUI application launcher, better mouse support for moving and resizing, login screens, etc.

Not everyone uses a Tiling WM because they're a masochist musophobe.

I think you are looking at it from the wrong angle. The WM is just a component of a complete desktop environment. Instead of making a Tiling WM that comes with the kitchen sink, we should make a Tiling WM that simply replaces the WM on the pre-existing, and fully featured, desktop environment you already have. Technically speaking, this is not challenging. For example, to make Awesome the defualt window manager in gnome, one need only run:

  "gconftool-2 --type string --set /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager awesome"

Obviously, this is a large barrier for a casual user wanting to try a tiling window manager. However, if WM installer changed that setting instead of just creating its own desktop environment, then we would not be having this problem.

I'm a casual user of GNOME. I would like to do what someone mentioned on here: use a TWM with the GNOME menu bar for applets but I want them to have predifined "snaps". [0]

How hard is it to implement this?

[0] http://imgur.com/SO4LmDq

Agreed on your second paragraph. Tiling as a model is, imo, better for the general case than overlapping for all levels of users (and you can see the move by both MS and Apple towards full-screen windows as a really naive step towards that ideal), not just power users. I use i3 and I love it, but its mouse-phobia drives me nuts sometimes. I'd really like to be able to hold down Super and just frickin' drag a pane/container/workspace to the place I want it to be with the mouse. That's the sort of thing it's meant for.

> It still annoys that tiling window managers all seem designed to be hard to use to configure

i3 really stands out. Instead of requiring user to hack with specific language (haskell for xmonad, lua for awesome.. )it has a simple config file with clear documentation.

While i agree that xmonad is a bit of a pain to configure the first time around (especially if you're not used to writing code in haskell) I find that you can use the mouse pretty extensively with xmonad.

For example with this in my xmonad.hs:

  ((0,9), (\_ -> moveTo Next NonEmptyWS))
  ((0,8), (\_ -> moveTo Prev NonEmptyWS))

I can move between work spaces with only my mouse (In this case with the extra 2 buttons on the left).