they weren't promoting an OS, they were promoting a user experience - A GUI that competed with the Mac.

There were OS improvements too, but I have forgot what. The real improvements came with Win2K - one of the best versions of Windows ever.

The primary value of overlapping windows is spacial memory: you remember where a given window is positioned on a 2D surface. The moment I grasped this I had the “oh boy I sure am glad this window partially overlaps this other window.”

(At one moment, I used to work on a single desktop with around 20 windows, no dock, just windows, on my 14in MacBook with 125% DPI. Too much but possible. Now I keep only 6-7 windows.)

This is not to say that dynamic window management is worse. Far from it. But it excels at this: dynamic, rapidly changing environments, where at almost any given moment something is either opening, closing, or changing its dimensions. This is usually the case with specialized programs like web browsers or IDE, but not with the main system WM.

The main problem is that overlapping windows and automatic window management are incompatible. The former assumes that user sets the dimensions and is always right, which makes the latter powerless to follow any efficient algorithm. To give an example, if you manage your windows with a dock and “maximize” button, they’d break overlapping patterns.

> I either want one full screen windows or a few windows side by side.

You’re not wrong to work like this, but it may be a byproduct of modern hybrid systems making it harder to fully internalize the overlapping windows concept.

I think stacking windows make more sense in the context of the pre-OS X Macintosh UI. The Mac was built entirely around the concept of spatial manipulation. When you opened a folder, it would remember the exact position and size of its window, where all of the icons were, where your scroll bar was, whether the folder was set for icon, list, or detail view, etc. Every window was permanently and unambiguously associated with a single folder. This made navigating the computer possible entirely through muscle memory. Just like you know where all the light switches and doorknobs are in your house after a few months, you would gain the ability to navigate through files on your computer extremely quickly because when you double click on a folder you already knew where it would open and what would show up in the window. Instead of remembering a file path, you would remember a series of mouse motions to get where you wanted with very little conscious thought. Obviously this workflow isn't suitable for everyone, but a lot of people enjoyed it and I think it's a shame that Apple decided to throw it out for Mac OS X.

Another feature that gets a lot of flack from some Linux users is desktop icons. This is something else that a lot of UIs screwed up (maybe stemming from Windows 95? I'm not sure). The classic Mac UI let you drag whatever files you were currently working on to the desktop and do whatever you needed to do. Then when you were done with the files, you could highlight them and select "Put Away" and they'd all get moved back to their original locations. The desktop was a temporary space for what you were actively working on, not a giant catch-all storage location like how modern UIs treat it.

Most of the time, I want the active application window in the middle of the screen, but not necessarily filling the whole screen or the whole height, and also not necessarily centered. The window position and size depends on its contents, what sidebars it has, and so on. This inherently leads to overlapping windows. I use a tool that automatically moves and resizes windows to the application-specific desired position, while also having the ability to arrange a split-screen view using keyboard shortcuts when needed.

To be fair, in the era when resolutions like 512x342 or 640x480 were common overlapped windows were quite useful.

Focus management is such a tricky beast.

Yeah.

> The likelihood of any legal restriction was probably close to zero - it’s only from today’s era of hyper-regulation that we might even imagine something like that.

Normally I'd agree with a statement like this. Except this is a very specific case.

That lawsuit happened in response to Window 2.0, and the fact that they adopted overlapping windows in 2.0 strongly suggests that Microsoft did not think that the change would lead to legal action and was taken by surprise.

They didn't even sue DRI, just threatened to sue: https://nemanjatrifunovic.substack.com/p/history-of-the-gem-...

I also can't imagine calling our current era "hyper-regulation" with respect to software. The Microsoft antitrust case was only 16 years after Windows 1.0, but this year will be the 25th since then.

And replacing it with even more regulations.

>"when Gates saw the Xerox machine, the display had no overlapping windows". So M/S cloned it as he saw it. Once M/S W1.0 was developed he saw the demo again and was surprised the windows overlapped.

Microsoft had Apple Lisa's in-house, and Charles Simonyi in person direct from Xerox PARC, and worked on pre-release Macintoshes in coordination with Apple to develop Microsoft Word for the Mac, all well in advance of any MSWindows development. There is no way the story is as simple as the above.

Yeah, it’s interesting how the desktop metaphor evolved over time but increasing display size and the ability to have multiple workspaces surely is a huge part of what makes tiling almost work.

And tiling still largely doesn't work with small windows.

We don't have to guess about what was going on at Microsoft in those days. From "Barbarians Led by Bill Gates":

The day the Mac shipped in January 1984, Gates told McGregor to run out and buy a Mac for the Windows developers.

"Reverse engineer it," Gates told him. "I have applications like BASIC and Multiplan that we've hacked out for the Mac, and we're working on other Mac applications like Word with a graphical user interface. I want to run all those Mac applications on Windows." Apparently, Gates didn't see a conflict of interest with this strategy.

...

"How are they different?" Gates snapped back. "They both draw fucking lines on the screen, right? They both put things in windows, right? Mac wrote a windows thing, you wrote a windows thing, they ought to be able to run the same stuff together."

They are a bit out of fashion these days.

The main use-case was multiplexing terminals and, after tmux provided a solution that was usable by normal users, it seduced people away.

Also, mouse-first tiling was introduced on Windows so nowadays it is almost universal to have a degree of tiling.

They are nice for terminals and browsing properly-written web pages but for anything with an aspect ratio or a fixed size they are clumsy.

Modern tiling-wms often have a floating mode so the distinction is more keyboard-wm vs mouse-wm.

You can tile windows in Windows as well with the windows key+ arrow buttons.

The default is just left, right, and top, bottom but if you install Power Toys and use Fancy Zones you can customize the zones https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/fancyzon....

There’s also Crop and Lock which can help you cut out extraneous parts of certain windows

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/crop-and...