Not sure what you want to hear. If you've expecting to hear a sales pitch on awesome, I don't think there is a need, you're installing a free wm, not buying a car, just test it in virtualbox first if you're worried. If you're asking about specific features of a modern wm, they're all there - some not through vm itself (for example I installed awesome on top of xfce and use thunar file manager, and several xfce widgets). It's been a while since I installed awesome, I didn't like the idea of tiling wms at first, but now got so used to it I installed hammerspoon on my OSX to emulate it.
Awesome works fine out of the box, I don't remember if I had to do anything to get my dual-monitors working but xrandr drives that and I mapped windows+P to switch between display setups via bash script. One thing to note is that keyboard shortcuts weren't intuitive to me right away so I switched some around. The default theme is also pretty ugly, but replacing it with one of preset ones from github is pretty easy ( https://github.com/copycat-killer/awesome-copycats). It also doesn't come with a compositor at first (so no shadows or transparent windows you may be used to), but that's a good thing since it gives you more flexibility. I use compton as my compositor and really like it. Unless you plan to customize your look and feel, you don't really need much lua. There are available widgets like volume, networking, etc. you can plug in (and will need to do if your theme doesn't already come with them). My only pet peeve with awesome is it's name, try googling for anything regarding awesome and see how often the first page contains a relevant result. On Tue, Sep 8, 2015 at 1:58 PM, Ray Andrews <[email protected]> wrote: > Gentlemen, > > I use xfce, it's fine, but I want something lighter. All I really want is > the xfwm part of it, and even that window manager has its defects. I have > dual monitors, and I can't drag anything between monitors. I hate trying > to configure things using those stupid pop up dialogue boxes. I'd like > text configuration files that I can edit, save, backup and restore. > > Awesome seems well spoken of. What can you guys tell me? I can't think > what to specifically ask. It would be nice if it worked sensibly out of > the box. I don't need fancy effects. I want windows on screens that I > can resize, maximize, minimize, etc. Nice if they snap to borders to > avoid wasted space. Xfce gives normally six or so desktops than you can > change to, that's good. The mouse has to work. I need custom keyboard > shortcuts. Basically nothing strange. I don't want to have to spend six > months learning Lua. I want a simple, predictable, configurable WM that > is usable but doesn't bother me with bells and whistles. > > Advice? >
