Speaking as someone who often communicates before considering whether the people I'm speaking to share my background knowledge... this might be a more effective message if you ask "have you tried ____?"
Sure, I know this sounds like well-actually anyway, but I tried to soften it by not asking "have you not used..."?
On any Ubuntu/debian system this is pretty trivial try using apt install. You've i3 which is an old popular program with a big community. You use it with scripts like dmenu. It's definitely more of a "hacker" setup that your parents probably aren't going to want to use, but if what you are doing is focusing on a few documents, it's hard to beat. It's a lot more complete than floating single windows over your pane of code. The Bonsai implementation is slow in comparison.
There are lots of others like bspwm (even more hardcore), but my favorite anyone can use this tiling window manager is easily pop_os's from System76. When I have to use Windows or Mac and I don't have that functionality it is annoying.
This functionality really should just be built into the OS. The mac equivalent hacks have slowly gotten incorporated into official releases over the years (side by side windows), but they seem to pop up and then die, like Spectacle. If these guys want to do more than just browser documents, what they've got to build is essentially a cross platform tiling window manager. Not easy.
I think the closest you could come to hacking this together is with qtile (py) and you could get pretty close functionality wise.
