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#1 2025-02-12 10:54:52

Whoracle
Member
Registered: 2010-11-02
Posts: 172

Looking for Alternative to AwesomeWM

Hey there, folks!

I've been using AwesomeWM for the last 10ish years, and tried on-and-off to look for alternatives. Not because of anything Awesome does wrong, just to switch it up a bit, and maybe check out wayland down the road.

I'm not using the Awesome feature set to its fullest, but my Google-Fu failed me for one specific issue.
So here are the must-haves:

  • Tiling WM

  • Switchable Auto-Tiling modes. This is where my Google-Fu failed me. The WM needs to arrange windows by a given pattern, and be able to rearrange on a keypress. I am using the following Modes:

    • Standard vertical tiling

    • Centered horizontal tiling - one client bigger than the others

    • Centered vertical tiling - one client bigger than the others

    • Floating

  • Predefine auto-tiling mode per Monitor

  • Specify Rules per Windows Class etc (e.g. "Firefox always on Monitor 2, Desktop 1, Maximized" or "xlax always floating")

Nice-To-Haves

  • Predefine auto-tiling mode per Desktop/Tag

On the Wayland side of things I have so far looked at Hyprland, which doesn't do what I want (or I was too stupid) and Sway, which doesn't play nice with NVIDIA. And while I am open to one day have an AMD GPU, I'll be driving my 3080 for the foreseeable future.

Any suggestions? Especially with the auto-tiling? I don't really want to install and test a bunch of WMs (and possibly a wayland stack) just to find out after 10 minutes that I need to tile manually.

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#2 2025-02-12 14:55:50

Outswayer
Member
Registered: 2023-03-14
Posts: 10

Re: Looking for Alternative to AwesomeWM

The incompatibilities of Sway and Nvidia are largely solved these days, at least I don't have any glaring issues anymore - no flickering or simply black windows anymore. while it might take a while for the fixes to land everywhere, I do believe on Arch we've reached a point where Sway is very usable with nvidia. That said I only have a RTX2070, which is recent enough to support the open source kernel modules if i understand correctly - not sure how older cards would do, but older cards are supposed to be decent on Nouveau so should be fine too. but I imagine your 3080 will work fine.

That said, Switchable Auto-Tiling might not be up to your standard. especially the one client bigger than the others thing might need some setup/scripting. I just run with the simple horizontal and vertical tiling, it's easy enough to open a browser window and a terminal side by side, and then hit my hotkey to switch the tiling and open up 2 more terminals on that side, so i end up with one of my favorite layouts.

Rules for having windows on specific desktops are easy enough, i use some like that in my sway config, i imagine setting them to floating or something should work too.

Last edited by Outswayer (2025-02-12 14:56:28)

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#3 2025-10-11 17:04:16

jpsp
Member
Registered: 2025-10-11
Posts: 1

Re: Looking for Alternative to AwesomeWM

I haven't tried it yet, but intend to do so, since it's Awesome-based I hope it fulfils your requirements (which resemble my own): cwc

Caveat: On the GH page there's a warning that there might be occasional crashes, so I have no idea how stable this is:

Crashes may happen so daily driving isn't recommended unless you're okay with them. If you encounter any crashes, please report them by creating an issue with steps to reproduce. I will fix it as quickly as possible because I also daily drive it and I want my setup to be super stable.

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#4 2025-10-13 10:45:15

LuxFerre
Member
Registered: 2010-03-01
Posts: 91

Re: Looking for Alternative to AwesomeWM

Niri may be a bit of a change, but I would give it a try. It does tiling in a different way but it's quite interesting.

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#5 2025-10-13 17:58:56

killertofus
Member
Registered: 2025-02-10
Posts: 40

Re: Looking for Alternative to AwesomeWM

try cwc it's the wayland version of awesome

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