When comparing awesome vs dwm, the Slant community recommends dwm for most people. In the question“What are the best desktop environments for Arch Linux?” dwm is ranked 7th while awesome is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose dwm is:
Dwm is a low-resource window manager that is entirely simplistic in design.
Specs
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Pros
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.
Pro Simple and small
Dwm is a low-resource window manager that is entirely simplistic in design.
Pro Encourages user modification
Dwm is part of the suckless suite of tools, and encourages users to extend and configure it by modifying the code itself. To this end, dwm is kept under 2000 SLOC, and is an exemplar of clean, readable code (C). This, while giving users all the flexibility they could ask for, also makes dwm as lightweight as possible, and means that users have a full understanding of how it works.
Pro XRandR/Xinerama support
Dwm has support for XRandR and Xinerama, allowing for multi-monitor support.
Pro Many and unique patches available
Thanks to the small codebase, many users contributed patches to the suckless website. They offer unique functionality, e.g. swallow or fakefullscreen, that is not seen in many other WMs.
Pro Sane defaults
Uses Master&Stack layout by default.
Pro Minimalist
Small and easy to digest source for those who want to patch it.
Pro Easy to configure
Configuring dwm is straight-forward thanks to its config.h file (though it will have to be rebuilt for the effects to take place).
Pro Fast
Feels even faster than others minimal window manager.
Pro Very customizable
The clean code and the patches allow us to configure dwm to be exactly what we want.
Pro Default keybindings and functionality are very useful and well thought-out
An example of this is the application of alt-tab to switch between two tags.
Pro No glitches
Imagine a window manager that works perfectly in every situation. No glitches, no delays, no slow downs, no focus problems. Even the best window managers out there have glitches but dwm. Dwm works flawless.
Pro Useful and informative status bar
The dwm status bar can be set to display all kinds of useful information, such as volume level, wifi signal strength, and battery notification.
Pro Application grouping with tags
Dwm's design paradigm is to use tags to group clients (applications) that can then be pulled into a view (workspace); this allows you to view multiple clients at once and to assign or reassign those tags and their related views on the fly.
Contrary to most other window managers, when you view a tag you are not ‘visiting’ a workspace: you are pulling the tagged windows into a single workspace.
Combined with rules in the config.h
, this makes for a flexible and responsive means to manage your workflow.
Cons
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.
Con No runtime config file
There is no config file that can be edited after the window manager is compiled: all changes need to be made prior to compiling.
Con By developers, for developers
Basic knowledge of C language, general programming, and compilation are all required.
Con The patch system breaks the code
To add features one has to patch the original code. That maybe easy to do with only one patch, but things can go down hill after 3+ patches, specially for those who don't know how to code on C.
Con More latency
It uses Xlib instead of XCB.
Con X11 only
X11 is outdated and insecure, there are Wayland clones such as Velox and dwl, but dwm still takes the cake.