You can indeed get pretty far with most screen splitting as supported by Windows/Gnome. Tilers go even further than that and give you a few more nice features.

You can indeed get pretty far with most screen splitting as supported by Windows/Gnome. Tilers go even further than that and give you a few more nice features. I run i3 inside Mate (gnome 2 fork). The features I use most are switching between tiled and "tabbed", where you have fullscreen windows that can be navigated between like tabs quickly. I can pull up a browser and terminal or editor side by side, then switch to fullscreen terminal/editor, then back, very quickly. i3 works in sort of a tree structure, so you can, say, split the root window level into two horizontal frames, then split the left one into three vertical ones, and the right one into three internal horizontal ones (if that's what you want). I suspect I use the mouse more than most tilers, but I find <mod+Right Click> to resize while the windows stay tiled is quick enough and very accurate.