I enjoyed reading i3's landing page, thanks for linking.
So could you clarify for me, what's the relation between being a "tiling windows manager" and being light? Is it that for some technical reason one would expect tiling windows managers in general to be lighter than non-tiling? Or is it that orthogonally to the tiling aspect, i3 specifically aims to be light?
I don't think that there's anything inherent in tiling managers that mean they have to be light, but it's very common for them to be light. Ratpoison, xmonad, awesomewm and i3 are the most well known tiling managers (unless I've missed any out?) and all of them are very minimalist and resource light.
My non-expert take on this is that the sort of person who sees value in the efficiencies from using a tiling WM are also of a kind to use system resources efficiently too, even though they are orthogonal characteristics.
I have been using Openbox exclusively since about 2005. on both laptops and desktops. It is highly customizable, super light and floating window manager. Using wmctrl wrappers around launcher keystrokes or window management keystokes I can achieve the tiling functionality that I want without committing to tiling only workflow:
* space splitting for launcher
* some sticky displays in multi-display desktops
So could you clarify for me, what's the relation between being a "tiling windows manager" and being light? Is it that for some technical reason one would expect tiling windows managers in general to be lighter than non-tiling? Or is it that orthogonally to the tiling aspect, i3 specifically aims to be light?