I do quite like the stability of Cinnamon/Debian, and I think this problem is solvable (even if I have to solve it myself). I generally do not want to spend a lot of time futzing around with my desktop environment, but this is one thing I need to have.

I saw that and tried it pretty early on. That just moves the screen, it doesn’t fill the quadrant.

Updated to be specific, I’m using Cinnamon. Muffin is the builtin tiling window manager for Cinnamon and it does exactly what you’re describing. The problem is that it moves tiles, it doesn’t absolutely position them. You have to keep moving tiles around to get them where you want them, Rectangle just has hotkeys to immediately place and resize to fit the active window for each quadrant that it supports:

• ctrl+cmd+left: top left quadrant
• ctrl+cmd+right: top left quadrant
• shift+ctrl+cmd+left: bottom left quadrant
• shift+ctrl+cmd+right: bottom left quadrant
• alt+cmd+left: left half
• alt+cmd+right: right half
• alt+cmd+up: top half
• alt+cmd+left: bottom half
• alt+cmd+f: full screen

It’s hard to express how natural that feels after using it for a bit, and I’m still using a Macbook for work so the muscle memory is not going away.