With a tiling display manager like i3, dwm or awesome, system tray isn't that useful. You tends to have one app (or a group of app that you always use together) per virtual desktop that you access in one keyboard shortcut.
You never circle through apps as it's not necessary.
Most of the apps are in fullscreen or tiled depending on your need. No window is hiding another one.
When you're use to it, having to move your hand to the mouse or trackpad and click on stuff feels painful. Then keyboard driven apps (which terminal apps are usually really good at) makes total sense because you still don't want to have to move your hands and click in stuff.
Basically usability switches from graphical apps made for mouse/trackpad to keyboard driven. It's a quite different way to manages windows that have usually a learning curve as it is keyboard driven, but it's really efficient.
After using i3 for about 3-4 years, I have to admit that I'm always a bit lost on floating WMs now and feel like an idiot for a few minutes until I'm somewhat comfortable again.
To me tiling WMs are just vastly superior.
Anecdotally, most people I know that have seriously tried to use a tiling WM usually end up sticking with them.
Is this true for you on a laptop as well? I could imagine this on something where I had a lot of screen real estate. But when I'm coding, in one virtual desktop I'll typically have the IDE, a few terminal windows, and a couple of browsers going. With a 14" screen, I can't imagine how I'd make a tiling window manager work.
The great thing about i3 (and also other tiling WMs) is that they are very flexible and customizable to your preferred workflow.
Together with them being centered around the keyboard and easily scriptable, you can use them in a way that works best for your preferences and your environment.
For coding on my laptop, the active main workspace is split into three parts, with the editor taking the left half of the screen, and the right half split into browser and terminal (with the terminal being a TAB container with multiple terminals that I can quickly switch between).
When I need to focus on either the editor or the browser, I make them full screen (I have shortcuts to jump between full screen browser and full screen editor directly with one keystroke).
On other workspaces I have setups with music player, email, Jira/Bug tracker/etc that are always launched in the same configuration on boot and are also just a shortcut away.
So it works great on a laptop too, even if you spend a lot of time with one app maximized.
I felt like the kind of micro optimizations that a tiling window manager gives you aren’t worth it in the long run.
Sure, it felt like I was moving faster when I used keyboard shortcuts to fly around but at the end of the day, switching between windows was never a real bottleneck to begin with.
I switched to i3 because I was just frustrated with what I had used in the past. I wanted a simple window manager without animations (disabling them on my phone was also a huge gain in terms of usability), that just works and does not get in the way (I had a slow laptop on which Gnome was painfully slow, at the time). The cost was basically to write a configuration file matching what I wanted, learning a few key to switch workspaces and windows, but that was it.
I agree with you that these are micro-optimizations time-wise, but the frustration can be real and it gets in the way when you use your computer all day long. The simpler, the better I'd say (although it doesn't have to be a tiling window manager).
You never circle through apps as it's not necessary. Most of the apps are in fullscreen or tiled depending on your need. No window is hiding another one.
When you're use to it, having to move your hand to the mouse or trackpad and click on stuff feels painful. Then keyboard driven apps (which terminal apps are usually really good at) makes total sense because you still don't want to have to move your hands and click in stuff.
Basically usability switches from graphical apps made for mouse/trackpad to keyboard driven. It's a quite different way to manages windows that have usually a learning curve as it is keyboard driven, but it's really efficient.