When comparing Pantheon vs awesome, the Slant community recommends awesome for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like desktop environments for convertible laptops?” awesome is ranked 16th while Pantheon is ranked 17th. The most important reason people chose awesome is:
Awesome is highly configurable, allowing the user to change anything they see fit in order to make the WM work for them and their workflow.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Simple, clean aesthetic
Nonintrusive and easy to overview workspace.
Pro Lightweight
Pantheon is light on system resources, giving it the advantage of being able run well on a multitude of setups.
Pro Looks amazing
Looks absolutely amazing. Very nice to use. Amazing UX.
Pro Smooth, subtle animations
Nearly everything is animated, but it's not over the top.
Pro Splitting and animations
Switching between workspaces is fluid, pulling up the workspace preview bumps up the rest of the desktop, open windows show up on the switcher along with larger icons, and everything is subtly animated. You have two windows taking each half the screen by dragging to corners.
Pro Highly modular
While built to be integrated, Pantheon is also highly modular. Shell components like the Panel, Dock, and app launcher can be swapped out with limited repercussions.
Pro Great for minimalists
Although you cannot put icons on desktop, it comes with very low number of pre-installed softwares.
Pro Perfect for chromebook
It's light and easy.
Pro Slick, smooth desktop environment
Easy to use and easy to configure, there is almost nothing that the developers did not think of to creat a top-notch user experience.
Pro Highly configurable
Awesome is highly configurable, allowing the user to change anything they see fit in order to make the WM work for them and their workflow.
Pro Low latency
Awesome was the first window manager to be ported to use the asynchronous XCB library instead of XLib, making it much more responsive than most other window managers.
Pro Keyboard friendly
Awesome is really keyboard friendly and you can do almost anything with keyboard shortcuts.
Pro Fully extensible with Lua
Awesome can be skinned, configured, and extended with Lua, a language with a programming model similar to the ubiquitous Javascript. Learning resources for Lua are fairly abundant, as Lua is a popular extension language, often used for scripting in games.
Pro Stable
Awesome always works as it should: it is very stable and reliable.
Pro Good default configuration
By default, you'll have a status bar (hidden in some modes), an application launcher, automatic fullscreen, manual fullscreen shortcut, etc.
Pro Tags instead of workspaces
With awesome, clients are organized with tags: one client can be on more than one tag, and multiple tags can be displayed at the same time.
Pro Some mouse tiling support
You can rearrange and re-size [some] panels via the mouse.
Pro Xinerama support
Awesome has real multi-head support via XRandR/Xinerama, with per-screen desktops.
Pro Any window can be full screen
Select the window. Hold ALT+SHIFT and press SPACE until the window takes up the entire screen.
Pro Easy module for useless gaps
Lain module makes useless gaps easy.
Pro Excellent user configurations available
For those looking to customize the window manager, some beautiful examples can be found on Github and the subreddit r/unixporn that put other window managers to shame in the sheer potential to expand and modify the window manager awesome has.
Pro Single window, multi-workspace support
The user can have each window visible on one, multiple, or no workspace. You can also temporarily include another workspace in the current one.
Pro Can create tabbed containers for yourself or use a user library
Lua opens the possibility of adding these "missing" features through one's own efforts or one of the user libraries available on Github.
Cons
Con Poor reputation among Linux users
The whole Elementary OS project has a poor reputation among Linux users.
Con No icons on desktop
Con Too simple
Good for people who want a plug and play simple Desktop Environment. But for a multitasking / entertainment / cutting edge or Gaming Rig this is not the answer.
Con Requires tweaks to be usable
To enable things like the minimize button, status bar indicators, and what some might call "normal" desktop features, you need to tweak the system to make it usable.
Con Uses GTK
Nowadays, GTK is designed with GNOME, and only GNOME, in mind. Non-GNOME applications which attempt to utilize it suffer as a result. Pantheon is no exception.
Con Few configuration options
It is pretty bare-bones on a stock install, but further configuration options can be added through various official tweak tools.
Con Buggy
Con Not ideal for enterprise environments
As it has no set release date, and no set support and/or EOL dates, that makes it a not so good choice for enterprises managing a number of machines where such dates are important to know before hand.
Con Slow maintenance
Any significant updates come with new release, which usually takes 2-3 years. Hence gets obsolete with current software.
Con Not available for major Linux distributions
Con Limited to eOS-only
It means Pantheon won't work properly if installed on other distros. Manjaro has given up on trying since it works better on a LTS system and takes an eternity to realease a new version or add security updates. On Arch, Pantheon also doesn't work properly. People are trying it on Fedora, not sure how it works now. If you want to use Pantheon, better get to eOS.
Con Looks and feels like a Mac
Which may turn quite a few people off with the aesthetics, of course for some people, this is a pro.
Con You should have some skills to configure it
Awesome, like most window managers, is targeted at advanced users. Though is has sane defaults and easy to read documentation, it is still a far jump from the more common graphical UIs found in computing.
Con Messy configuration file
The config file is too long. The heavy reliance on modules (which you don't what each one does) makes it confusing for the user. And it is written in Lua. Combine these three things together and you get a ghastly monster of a configuration file.
Con Doesn't have tabbed containers
There is no option to have tabbed containers in awesome window manager.
Con Regular API breakage
Results in many of the scripts for awesome to be found online end up being outdated.
Con Updates break everything
There are substantial differences between versions, changing radical amounts of the window manager, that mean configurations need to be rewritten.
Con Pull requests for bug fixes take forever to get merged
Due to the number of devs required to do checks on the pull requests, they take upwards of 6 months before being merged into the main. This means if you need one of these features or fixes, you have to build from the source using that branch (which if you use the dev branch you probably already do).
Con Some programs don't cooperate well with tiling window managers
The user can usually work around this, but it can be quite annoying at the same time.
Con Configuration uses Lua (Programming Language)
It is time-consuming to make changes to configuration. Though Lua is a good language, a plain text file to configure things would seem to be a better approach.
Con Difficult to google for solutions to problems
Awesome is a very common word, making searches for solutions to problems using Google very time-consuming as a lot of chaff has to be sifted through.
Con Concept of layout sometimes does not fit what you want
The concept of layout sometimes does not fit what you want, for example, if you like the concept of layouts in tmux or in i3 - it works differently here.