I love the idea of tiling window managers and I've done reasonably long stints with i3 and hyprland, but for some reason, I've always struggled to fully stick with them and have fallen back to Xfce (old habits die hard).
I think what always ends the experiment is that once I reach a certain number of windows, it can be more challenging to manage them if you haven't gone deep enough down the rabbit hole to properly configure workspaces, layouts, etc.
I just fired up Niri, and in 10 minutes I already feel more comfortable than I have with other tiling window managers. It feels immediately intuitive, and the mouse integration is excellent. Maybe it's too early to declare victory, but this really truly looks like exactly what I've been wanting/needing for years. I'll judge how good it is by how long it takes me to think about going back to Xfce ;)
Tiling never worked for me either. Might be because the place I use Linux most is on laptops, where screens are too small to do much tiling aside from maybe splitting the screen in half (and even that doesn’t play nice with things like IDEs). Plain, boring, non-trendy floating WMs/DEs with some lightweight optional tiling has proven most optimal for me.
It’s on laptops where I appreciate tiling the most. Simple hotkey switching between apps (workspaces) is much better than mouse over some taskbar or alt tab tab tab tab.
With the tiling WM, you spend essentially no time arranging windows, they're all just laptop-screen-filling. On the ultrawide they're all 1/3rd of screen which is the perfect for that monitor size. I haven't clicked a single maximize button in a decade or so.
I think what always ends the experiment is that once I reach a certain number of windows, it can be more challenging to manage them if you haven't gone deep enough down the rabbit hole to properly configure workspaces, layouts, etc.
I just fired up Niri, and in 10 minutes I already feel more comfortable than I have with other tiling window managers. It feels immediately intuitive, and the mouse integration is excellent. Maybe it's too early to declare victory, but this really truly looks like exactly what I've been wanting/needing for years. I'll judge how good it is by how long it takes me to think about going back to Xfce ;)