Awesome (Tiling) Window Manager

My Go-To Gnome Alternative for Machines of All Sizes

Awesome WM has been my go-to solution for VMs and older machines since its early days. It’s modern, configurable, and lightweight. Perhaps, what’s more important is that it all just makes sense to me straight out of the box compared to the rest of the tiling window managers that are available out there. It also helps that it uses lua to configure your environment which is a pretty intuitive language. I guess what keeps me from using Awesome on all my *nix machines is that I am still most comfortable with Gnome 3. Especially since pop-shell’s conception, there’s really nothing out there that I enjoy more than Gnome 3 in a machine with plenty of power to handle bloat. On top of that, Cosmic in the recent Pop! OS 21.04 although controversial, made some personally welcoming adjustments as well without breaking my own customization which keeps me attached to Gnome 3 w/ Cosmic and pop-shell enabled for the foreseeable future especially when it comes to my Pop! OS machines like my Lemur Pro.

However, since I use Arch and Garuda a lot as well, with pop-shell support for Gnome 40 currently a bit incomplete and Workspace Matrix practically broken, I find myself using Awesome even more these days. I have even started using Awesome on my FreeBSD VM which has been working wonderfully but I digress.

With that said, one of the main complaints about tiling window managers from the general public is that it takes a lot of hacking the config file to get things to become usable. While I am cool with it, I find that it does get a bit tedious when I am setting up a lot of machines with it. After a while, I just end up copying files and such over to the new machine I am setting up in hopes of saving some time. So instead continuing to do that, I decided to setup a GitHub repo to make things a bit easier for myself: