I think desktop design in the 90s reached a point similar to car design did in the mid 1910s; the lack of innovation is a sign of maturity. Almost every car si

I think desktop design in the 90s reached a point similar to car design did in the mid 1910s; the lack of innovation is a sign of maturity. Almost every car since the Cadillac Type 53 has had more or less the same controls; a steering wheel, foot pedals for the accelerator/brake/clutch with accelerator on the right, brake to the left of that, and clutch to the left of the brake. Some deviation from this scheme is tolerable, new automatic systems sometimes replace manual controls like the clutch pedal, but for the most part every new car either conforms to this general scheme or sets itself apart as a weird outlier. Rarely there is a car with a yoke or joystick instead of a steering wheel, but it never catches on. Even if you managed to discover something marginally better but radically different, it probably wouldn't catch on because the status quo gets the job done and everybody already understands it. Re-learning how to drive because your car came with a joystick instead of a steering wheel isn't appealing to most people who view their car as a means to an end. (Also, I don't think there's an intrinsic connection between tiling window managers and terminal-focused setups. The apparent correlation between the two is a coincidence; the sort of people who choose one also often choose the other. GUI file managers and the like work fine under tiling window managers.)