Mostly just the terminal commands to draw the tmux borders and move the cursor around for vsplits. For long running commands with lots of output tmux saves bandwidth, especially if I switch to a different screen.
If they're a fad, they've been a fad for over 35 years, so no longer a fad. Get it?
I don't understand articles like this. Terminal multiplexers are tools that help people. And they're great tools especially when you work in environments where persistent sessions save your ass.
Sorry you're getting downvoted to hell, good article. Just so people know, the guy in the article uses a terminal multiplexer too, and is simply talking about some limitations. The titles clickbait and it starts off quite critical but that's to be expected in this day and age
Tiling window managers, and the removal of meaningless decorations, are signs of the changing times
What universe does the author live in? Almost no one is using a tiling window manager on desktop operating systems.
Terminals are a dying niche. They are still going to be needed by those programming or doing extreme power user stuff but most people do not touch a terminal. More so most people who can understand and work with a terminal choose not to when there is an option. Linux needs to leave terminals behind. Not completely but enough that most if not all things in Linux can be done by a reasonable GUI. Both Mac and Windows have this functionality. Why Linux hasn't gotten to this point is boggling. They've been trying for a decade or more and there are still things you can't do in very common distros without the terminal.
You're conflating the OS with desktop managers. And I disagree, terminals are an extremely useful tool - on any OS you'll eventually get into situations that you can only solve using a terminal (even on windows) because that's how these systems work internally (which is a good thing, because it's easy to automate).
Linux has gotten to that point, in OpenSuse you can do almost everything with a gui (you can't do everything without a console in Windows and Mac either).
I'm literally on OpenSuse right now and yesterday I had to drop down to the terminal just to get my Xbox controllers to work properly. I also had to drop to the terminal to see what video card driver I had installed and to install the actual one I wanted. OpenSuse is far from that point. Most if not all things can be done with a GUI in Windows. I don't use Mac much but with Windows, I don't need to drop to CMD because of those things. Control Panel has game controller stuff. Device Manager can tell you everything about any device you have connected and allow you to update, uninstall, and rollback device drivers. I know no GUI on Linux has that.
Microsoft PowerToys has a pseudo-tiling wm for Windows. There are loads of new options on Linux so while few people from the total population are using them, I think they're growing.
I'm sure you could get by without a terminal on modern desktop oriented distros. Windows has it's own weirdness, like having to manually edit the registry. Just because there's a GUI for that doesn't make it a better user experience. A ton of issues are basically unfixable by users on Windows and Mac. I'm not decompiling their kernel to figure out why sleep is so flakey. Linux is much more reliable.