For me it was a couple of X11 features not often found on mac or windows that made me think about the desktop in a desktop environment and what I want out of my

For me it was a couple of X11 features not often found on mac or windows that made me think about the desktop in a desktop environment and what I want out of my window manager. My timeline sort of goes as follows. 1. focus follows mouse, the window you are pointing at gets the focus. This feels very strange at first. but pulls a surprising amount of friction out of working with multiple apps. However you have to pair this with. 2. don't raise on focus. this let you work on a lower window. to raise you click on a specific part of the window, usually the title bar. if you don't have this focus follows mouse is terrible. this lets you have the main window(usually the documentation or reference) open on top while you type away on the lower window. 3. At this point I heard of i3 and it made perfect sense to me. I have never said "boy I sure am glad this window is half covered up" I ether want one app full screen, two apps side by side(reference and work) or many small apps(terminals). why not just have the window manager enforce this instead of me fiddling with windows. these days I use mainly use spectrwm because it fills that perfect middle ground between too sparse(dwm) and too featured(i3). That said, for my day to day operations(I sys-admin, so lots of terminals) it works great. however there are many apps that do not play well. for example, I recently set up a linux box for steam games and steam was not happy with i3(all menus were separate windows) this is probably fixable but I just went with a normal wm. And when I do actual work on it I am reminded why I like tiling wm's as I find myself shuffling windows all the time. Closing thoughts, an example of a tiling wm internal to an app is blender, even before I started using tiling wm's I thought blender had a very good ui for getting work done, much better than the mdi type apps that were common at the time. so just imagine your whole desktop working that way. And tabs, really tabbed interfaces should be a function of your window manager not the app, but that ship has sailed and I don't think there is any way to fix it now.