Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really don't get the benefit of a tiling window manager. I tried one and instantly felt boxed in. There's not enough room on the screen for everything I need to have opened and flip between, which is why I use an overlapping window manager in the first place.
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 con…
I've been using a tiling window manager (XMonad) for ~3 years now; this is definitely true for the first few days (or weeks/months) until you adjust. After that, there is less overhead as you become more familiar with how the window manager behaves.
But this is also true for stacking window managers.
> With a stacking window manager, the cognitive overhead of opening a window is much less.
I think the level of cognitive overhead involved comes down (in the case of tiling window mangers) to what window rules you have, what kind of bindings you have set up to navigate between windows, etc., and how comfortable you are with those rules and bindings; the less comfortable you are, the greater your cognitive load will be when trying to use them.
Again, this is also true for stacking window managers.
> Every new window on the stack doesn't affect the others you were using.
Unless it "steals" focus and blocks the window you were working on. But that's expected behavior in a stacking window manager, so it's not much of a disruption. And it's one a user will certainly be aware of when opening a new window.
And this can (and usually is) be true for tiling window managers as well.
> I see a lot of people that respond to you by appealing to some objective superiority of tiling window managers, but there's advantages and disadvantages to both.
Right. There are pros and cons to each and really, but most people just don't really care that much about what window manager they're using.
I do want to add that one of the biggest pros to a tiling window manager (and a few stacking WMs) is the amount of customization available; if you're using a WM like XMonad, i3, Sway, bspwm, herbstluftwm, etc., you can configure the WM to do basically anything (including behave like a stacking WM), while many stacking WMs are fairly limited in how much customization they can have.
But that makes the assumption you're interested in customizing, which not everyone is.