When comparing awesome vs Chromium, the Slant community recommends Chromium for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like desktop environments for convertible laptops?” Chromium is ranked 15th while awesome is ranked 16th. The most important reason people chose Chromium is:
Chrome and Chromium are available on almost every device nowadays
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
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 Cross-platform
Chrome and Chromium are available on almost every device nowadays
Pro Latest Blink
This is the browser Blink is made for and developed alongside.
Pro Sandboxing
Every tab and plugin runs in its own subprocess so they will never affect the whole browser ,however that consumes more memory than other browsers
Pro Completely Open Source
Both Chromium and and its rendering engine Blink are licensed under the BSD-license which includes no copyleft unlike the GNU or Mozilla Licenses.
Pro Access to Chrome's extensions
Chromium can access the Chrome Web Store and all the extensions hosted there can be installed and used on Chromium.
Pro Supports all of Google Chrome features
As Chrome is based on Chromium they overlap in supported features. Chromium syncs between devices, automatically updates, has great built-in developer tools, installs extensions without a restart, includes a combined text bar for entering URLs and searching and has excellent HTML5 compatibility just like Chrome.
Pro Bare
It does not have any extensions preinstalled and focuses to be a web browser.
Pro BSD license
You can do almost anything with the code.
Pro Gets constant updates
While the Chromium-based browser haev to adapt their code to the update before release, original Chromuim doesn't need it so it gets updated more constantly and frequently.
Pro Chromium sets the standard for Web Browsing
Since Google Chrome is the most used web browser, and that browser along with many others is based on Chromium, Chromium sets the standards for the internet and for security, and Firefox will always be years behind.
Pro Backed by Google
Chromium was first released as a large portion of Chrome's source code as an open source project by Google in september 2008. The idea was to encourage developers to review the underlying code and to contribute in making Chrome cross platform and port it to Mac and Linux as well.
Nowadays Chromium is a large project with a huge community that's standing behind it but still Google continues to take an extremely active role in Chromium development. This ensures the longevity and constant development and improvement of the browser.
Pro Does not come with Google
Unlike Chrome it does come wihout any Google account requirement.
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 Lacks privacy options
Con High RAM usage
Due the sandboxing, Chromium also eats a lot of RAM , which can be a problem for machines with smaller RAM.
Con No official builds
There are no official builds available so you have to rely on a third party distributor
Con Not possible to disable WebRTC
Con Fat, slow, and another piece of google spyware
Con Lacks support for certain common media formats
As Chromium avoids bundling any proprietary software, media that requires proprietary codecs or formats such as AAC, H.264, MP3 and Flash will not play by default on Chromium.
Con Can be dangerous / only available as Source
There are plenty of unofficial Chromium distributors and every one of them can disable specific features (like sandboxing) for their build, so you will never know what you get.