Questions about AwesomeWM

I am trying AwesomeWM on Arch.

So far I like it. It is fast and I like how it handles tiling.

That said, this is my first time going pure window manager and I’m running into some puzzles. So I have some questions for anyone out there who uses or has used Awesome.

  1. Do you run it alone or on top of a DE? Which DE? If no DE, then do you prefer GTK or QT applications?

I am using Brave browser which has already pulled GTK, so I feel like I want to avoid QT for simplicity, but I’m open to suggestions.

  1. What File Manager do you use?

I installed Nautilus per GTK bias, but I see that I have 2 sets of window controls (minimize/maximize/close). I have also managed to accidentally maximize one window over another and now it is not respecting the AwesomeWM tiling…

  1. What screenshot utility do you use?

  2. What lockscreen do you use?

Haven’t really thought about these yet, but I will need them.

  1. Assuming no DE, do you use any GUI system configuration or just edit conf files?

I can manually edit conf files, but for some things like audio device switching and monitor arrangement, a gui is ideal.

  1. I am seeing some screen tearing during browser scroll. GPU is a Radeon 5100wx, so no nvidia driver nonsense and this wasn’t an issue on previous Linux installs on this system. Do I need to do something to make this go away?

  2. Is there a good beginners guide to configuring Awesome? I know they have docs, but I didn’t see anything resembling a guide. Looking for something like “first 10 things to configure in awesomewm”. Right away, I need to increase the size of the menu bar and would like to have gaps…


Anyway, thanks to anyone who can share some insight! I am excited to get my hands dirty.

Shameless mentions: @Even747 @freqlabs

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5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Let’s try out Awesome