I wrote a nice long response to this, but HN apparently ate my comment :-(. Here's a second try.
> can someone explain what the advantage of a tiling wm is? here people talk about not using the mouse, but i don't use the mouse with kde most of the time (maybe i am already "tiling" as as i have my xterm and browser side-by-side, or an ide window that's full screen, and simply alt-tab).
Sure. Need your web browser? Mod-W. Need your chat client? Mod-C. Need your terminal? Mod-Enter. Need to close this window? Mod-X. Need this window to be full screen instead of side by side (or any other layout you've defined)? Mod-L. Have you ever spent more than 10 seconds fiddling with gimp's multi window design? Problem solved with a tiling WM.
There's another advantage which isn't necessarily a tiling WM specific thing, although it is typically only implemented by tiling window managers. Your windows are grouped by screen, not by screen set. This means you can have your web browser on screen 1 and your terminal on screen 2. You read the tutorial from screen 1, get an error on screen 2, bring up IRC on screen 1, paste something in, talk to someone, get your error fixed, then switch back to the tutorial. Most traditional window managers (compiz/beryl is/were a notable examples) don't have screen independence, so you need a terminal for each viewport.
> also, when i look at tiling wm screenshots, they often look terrible, with things like huge clocks, apparently because of horizontal/vertical stacking. are there any that are flexible enough to look attractive?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and some people think simplicity is beauty. That said: there was a fantastic talk that Matt Harrison gave about qtile at pycon a few years ago. He ran the test suite, which uses xclock as a window to test things. Hopefully that's not what you're basing your conclusions on.
> finally, can i still use applications like amarok (the kde music player) in a tiling window manager? what about all the kde infrastructure for sound management (phonon etc) that amarok depends on? what starts that? does the tiling window manager run in kde?
Yep, they all work fine. I use clementine as my media player on a daily basis. I use a custom X session to start qtile and I do a few other things beforehand, but you can run it directly if you want, or start it within some other DE.
> another q - how do things like vms work? is there some way to integrate windows from a vm?
A tiling WM doesn't change how you interact with your software, just how you interact with your windows. Thus, you get one big window, same as you always did. I think qemu allows you to run apps in their own window, though I've never tried it.
> can someone explain what the advantage of a tiling wm is? here people talk about not using the mouse, but i don't use the mouse with kde most of the time (maybe i am already "tiling" as as i have my xterm and browser side-by-side, or an ide window that's full screen, and simply alt-tab).
Sure. Need your web browser? Mod-W. Need your chat client? Mod-C. Need your terminal? Mod-Enter. Need to close this window? Mod-X. Need this window to be full screen instead of side by side (or any other layout you've defined)? Mod-L. Have you ever spent more than 10 seconds fiddling with gimp's multi window design? Problem solved with a tiling WM.
There's another advantage which isn't necessarily a tiling WM specific thing, although it is typically only implemented by tiling window managers. Your windows are grouped by screen, not by screen set. This means you can have your web browser on screen 1 and your terminal on screen 2. You read the tutorial from screen 1, get an error on screen 2, bring up IRC on screen 1, paste something in, talk to someone, get your error fixed, then switch back to the tutorial. Most traditional window managers (compiz/beryl is/were a notable examples) don't have screen independence, so you need a terminal for each viewport.
> also, when i look at tiling wm screenshots, they often look terrible, with things like huge clocks, apparently because of horizontal/vertical stacking. are there any that are flexible enough to look attractive?
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and some people think simplicity is beauty. That said: there was a fantastic talk that Matt Harrison gave about qtile at pycon a few years ago. He ran the test suite, which uses xclock as a window to test things. Hopefully that's not what you're basing your conclusions on.
> finally, can i still use applications like amarok (the kde music player) in a tiling window manager? what about all the kde infrastructure for sound management (phonon etc) that amarok depends on? what starts that? does the tiling window manager run in kde?
Yep, they all work fine. I use clementine as my media player on a daily basis. I use a custom X session to start qtile and I do a few other things beforehand, but you can run it directly if you want, or start it within some other DE.
> another q - how do things like vms work? is there some way to integrate windows from a vm?
A tiling WM doesn't change how you interact with your software, just how you interact with your windows. Thus, you get one big window, same as you always did. I think qemu allows you to run apps in their own window, though I've never tried it.