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Awesome window manager framework version 4.0 changes

awesomewm.org

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Re: Awesome window manager framework version 4.0 changes

#3

Post by vbernat »

petepete wrote: post #2

I used to use and love AwesomeWM for years, super fast, moderately easy to customise and very lightweight. Eventually I switched to Gnome 3 simply because it made configuring wi-fi and power options easier.

It's totally possible to use parts of Gnome with Awesome. Pulling Network Manager is easy because they try to not make it too dependent on Gnome (to be able to make it usable on servers). Other parts may require gnome-session but if you don't mind running half of Gnome in addition of Awesome, it should work just fine.

Re: Awesome window manager framework version 4.0 changes

#5

Post by icebraining »

vbernat wrote: post #3
petepete wrote: post #2

I used to use and love AwesomeWM for years, super fast, moderately easy to customise and very lightweight. Eventually I switched to Gnome 3 simply because it made configuring wi-fi and power options easier.

It's totally possible to use parts of Gnome with Awesome. Pulling Network Manager is easy because they try to not make it too dependent on Gnome (to be able to make it usable on servers). Other parts may require gnome-session but if you don't mind running half of Gnome in addition of Awesome, it should work just fine.

+1, I use nm-applet with Awesome, works great.

Re: Awesome window manager framework version 4.0 changes

#6

Post by hsitz »

petepete wrote: post #2

I used to use and love AwesomeWM for years, super fast, moderately easy to customise and very lightweight. Eventually I switched to Gnome 3 simply because it made configuring wi-fi and power options easier.

I use i3 wm and I like it a lot, don't ever want to go back to a non-tiling WM. But I do understand complaints about the hassle of configuring wifi, power options, and other stuff, e.g., sound, display brightness. All of this is done automically by desktop environments; none of it is done by a mere window manager.

I wonder whether Awesome is similar to i3 in this regard. On the i3 help forum a good number of questions are about configuring these things. Many people respond that these aren't part of a window manager, which is of course correct. Nevertheless, it seems to me that these WM projects harm their own popularity by not having clear and easily findable instructions on how to do these configurations in the most popular linux distributions. Newcomers to i3 (or, I assume, Awesome) can find the configuration info on their own, of course, but you have to dig for it. It seems to me this is the only downside of adopting a tiling WM, the need to have some expertise and willingness to poke around and learn how to configure the necessary "desktop environment" options.

Re: Awesome window manager framework version 4.0 changes

#8

Post by mlgh »

If you think that awesome wm is bloated, try dwm on which awesome wm was historically based. The key bindings look the same. After I've noticed that I haven't used 90% of awesome wm functionality, I moved to a dwm which is basically 2k lines of readable C code in a single file and never looked back - it's so easy to configure it to do exactly what you need.

Re: Awesome window manager framework version 4.0 changes

#10

Post by aban »

petepete wrote: post #2

I used to use and love AwesomeWM for years, super fast, moderately easy to customise and very lightweight. Eventually I switched to Gnome 3 simply because it made configuring wi-fi and power options easier.

Yup, been there too, but I simply can't go back to a non-tiling WM after being spoiled with tiling ones.

If you want to give it a shot, there's a guide on using Awesome with Gnome [0], and the last time I tried it worked just fine. Though, awesome replaces both mutter (Gnome's WM) and the Gnome Shell itself, so you won't have Gnome's panel etc anymore.

I wanted a nicer integration between a DE and a WM, and the two nicest options by far have been Xfce and LXQt for me.

LXQt makes it trivial to use your own WM (they use Openbox by default) since they have an option for it in their Preferences [1].

With Xfce however it's a bit more involved [2], since Xfce is more tightly coupled with Xfwm and using a custom WM is not as easy as LXQt makes it.

That said, I'm using Xfce + bspwm for now (as opposed to LXQt + bspwm) mainly because Xfce's display and power manager are more matured than LXQt's.

[0]: https://web.archive.org/web/20160726160922/https://awesomewm...

[1]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/LXQt#Replace_Openbox

[2]: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Xfce#Default_window_man...

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