When comparing Qtile vs Arcan, the Slant community recommends Arcan for most people. In the question“What are the best Wayland compositors?” Arcan is ranked 5th while Qtile is ranked 21st. The most important reason people chose Arcan is:
A pro- for programmers, but it is much easier to write a Window Manager for Arcan that it is for Xorg or any of the other options.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Hackable ecosystem
With easy writing your own widgets or extensions, hooks you can make it powerful integrated system. Dmenu friendly environment. Easy scriptable even with bash by qtile-cmd. Nice keybinding cheet sheet generator
Pro Extensible
It's easy to write your own layouts, widgets, and built-in commands.
Pro Written and configured entirely in Python.
You can leverage the full power and flexibility of the language to make it fit your needs.
Pro Free and open-source software.
It's distributed under the permissive MIT license.
Pro Active and growing community
There's always someone to lend a hand when you need help.
Pro Interactive
The commands you use in the Qshell (built in shell for interacting with the window manager) has an intuitive filesystem-like feeling, while staying so close to Python syntax you can basically paste it into your config file. And the best part, if you don't like Qshell, just use Your shell. qtile-cmd exposes all of Qtile's functionality to the console.
Pro Nice API for custom Window Managers
A pro- for programmers, but it is much easier to write a Window Manager for Arcan that it is for Xorg or any of the other options.
Pro Tons of features
So many things that can be done - video recording, streaming, clipboard managers, crash recovery, live window manager swapping, ... the list is endless.
Pro VR support
Pro Very customizable
Cons
Con Doesn't handle errors well
As Qtile uses python, it crashes upon errors instead of handling it gracefully ( like in awesomwm).
Con Difficult configuration
To work it requires configured Lua files, command line options, environment variables.