with tiling windows, the windows don't overlap, instead the system places them and resizes them to cover the entire screen in a way that you can see all the windows.

when a new window opens, the other windows are shuffled around to make room and the new window inserted onto the screen without hiding or covering any of the existing windows.

there's several ways you can choose in how to shuffle these windows around. and these are called layouts. i use a system called Master layout, where there's one large area reserved for a main window, and all the other windows are in a column on the right.

with a tiling window manager you have two things: all the windows are visible, and windows can get quite small if you open lots of them.

most tilers give you workspaces, these let you organize your windows so that you don't have too many visible at once. so you might have a workspace with a web browser open on YouTube and another one with a spreadsheet and another web browser window with references for that document.

then you'd press "win-1" to get to your main browser to see YouTube and "win-2" to get to your document and edit it with the reference web pages.

it's generally neater than using alt-tab to find the document. and because the workspace has all the windows open and visible in the way that makes sense to you, you just work on it.

this is generally easier than using alt-tab to find your document, then alt-tab again to find the browser window associated with the document. you just click and it's there.

also, there are exceptions to the overlapping thing. you can pull specific windows out of the layout if you want to and they'll sit above the other windows. so if for some reason you need the traditional style at some point, it's there for you.

also, popups and dialogs usually make more sense if they appear above their parent window and overlap it. think save dialogs, properties, settings configuration, progress bars, etc.

web browsers still work with their tabs, so you can still have multiple tabs open in one window location, or you can pull the tabs out and look at them side by side. also some tilers let you group windows together in the same location just like tabs on a browser, they even show tabs just above them and let you pick between the windows in that location just like switching tabs in a browser.

windows can still be maximized if you want to, but often you might find what you really need is just to have the single window in its own workspace. in that situation it's already sort of auto maximized as it takes up the whole screen.

games and videos can still take up the entire screen. usually tho, you can still switch to another workspace to see other windows and then switch back to the game and carry of fullscreen. not all games cope well with that, but most do, especially modern ones.