There are UIs on Linux (& *BSDs) that you cant get anywhere else - tiling window managers. I'd argue that a tiling WM is the greatest UI for a poweruser/programmer/devops. There is a learing curve, but once you memorize a few hotkeys you wont be able to go back to a floating windows mess.
Why a tiling wm instead of tmux? The only thing I want to tile is my terminal anyways -- tiled GUIs generally don't work well and alt-tabbing through them is a better UX.
You probably answered your own question there. They might want to tile things other than a terminal.
I used to use Ion3 on a tiny Fujitsu Lifebook P1510D to divide the screen into quadrants containing things like a terminal (mostly used for IRC), Pidgin, a browser, and whatever videos I might be watching.
Quadrants with the same stuff are easy to do in Windows (with Win+arrows). The tricky part is in various autolayouts &c. But that is also where usefulness diminishes for non-terminal stuff. GUI apps usually expect stacking.
As soon as you are tiling mouse-driven GUIs your having to do more work to traverse your screen with the mouse vs a stacking wm where your stacked GUIs can be flipped through with keyboard shortcuts.
I guess it makes sense if you have a bunch of apps you're predominantly reading from instead of interacting with but in my experience those are predominantly terminal UIs anyways.
Why not? I use a tiling wm and I love it. I'm able to make my desktop act exactly the way I want it to act. I don't appreciate my windows being rambunctious.
If I'm on a machine without a tiling wm I generally using everything maximized and alt-tab like you say. But that's still usually an extra click after opening an application.
I also love tmux, but I have a coworker that doesn't see the point.
So, having options is nice. I want to be able to work the way I want. I also want you and my coworker to be able to work your way.
I guess it depends on your setup but being able to attach to an existing tmux session from another machine is something a tiling wm won't be able to offer.
