It has been almost 2 years since I started ricing. I started out with this generic rice, it consisted of a simple polybar, lots of blur and the infamous catppuccin theme. My introduction to linux and my excitement to use linux was because of unixporn. The idea of creating a personalised workspace where you control // tweak every little thing on your desktop was fun. After that first rice, I have changed window managers frequently. I have used i3, leftwm, was daily driving dwm for a long time, went back to bspwm, back to dwm. I cycled between dwm and bspwm a lot of times but then I was introduced to awesome…

… and I just uninstalled it after a couple of hours. And this happened multiple times. My first few attempts at awesome did not go well. It was very difficult for me to understand the default rc.lua configuration file. Each time I used to try awesome, I tried to modify the rc.lua by copying other repositories and failed miserably. This is where I also feel most of the people back away from awesome, because of its learning curve. It was in the December of 2023 that I took the decision to get into awesome and this time, actually stay with it. To be honest, I took the decision at that time because EWW was wildly featureless at that time compared to what it is today. This time, the process of understanding and modifying the configuration was made miles easier by suconakh’s modularized version of the default rc.lua. For people just getting into awesome, I would recommend this newer modularized version from the CEO of malgware™.

I used awesome for like almost a year straight before going wayland for some time with [hyprland + EWW] and then [swayfx + ags] before I went to awesome once again.

But why?

This is a very difficult question to answer because it does not have any hard points to convince you to give awesome a try. At the end, it just boils down to “to my personal preference // bias.” Awesome seems very comfortable to use and spending more than a year in it has made me inseperable from it. I might try out new stuff but I will always end up back here. With awesome the possibilities are endless, and the only thing blocking your way is your imagination (and your programming skills).

There might be one solid reason to use awesome. And it is something I will call “All in One”. With awesome, you can code in notifications, window swallowing, scratchpads, a bar (and maybe the most advanced bar out there), even crazy services for that matter to control everything via awesome, directly into the config itself. This eliminates the need of managing other progams like dunst and EWW. EWW’s language for defining widgets, is not very “advanced”, meaning much of the logic control and stuff like fetching windows, clients or else is done via shell scripts. In awesome, you can do that (still via executing shell commands), but writing services in lua is much more enjoyable than bash.

This was a very short one and only made to appreciate the awesome window manager. I am working on a guide on how to create widgets with awesome, so make sure to check that out as well. Will take some weeks from the date of this post. Thanks for reading! Before I go, I will quickly mention this guide for those who are keen to use // try out awesome.