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Comment by burgerbrain | Hacker News Reader

Is there a compelling reason for somebody already using Awesome WM to look into Xmonad? Seems like I'm hearing about it more often these days.

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I am an Xmonad user that tried Awesome, and the main thing that didn't work for me is that it seemed that Awesome workspaces (tags) were tied to particular monitors. Perhaps I just didn't take the time to figure out how to do it properly, but that was a deal-breaker for me.

In Xmonad, I have configured twenty different workspaces, and I can easily swap them in and out of any given monitor. With a triple-monitor configuration, this is quite handy.

That's what did it for me too. I'm sure there is a way in awesome to do it but its not as easy as xmonad.

Xmonad seems to not get in the way as much as awesome. For my purposes xmonad is just a lot simpler, but I am sure I am barely scratching the surface feature wise.

A lot of the awesome docs/screenshots reminded me of enlightenment-porn back when e17 seemed like vaporware. I don't need crazy graphs/apps/eye-candy just help me arrange organize my windows and go away.

The crazy stuff doesn't come with a base awesome install, that's stuff people added on their own. The base install looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Awesome_screenshot.png

XMonad _is_ simpler, since awesome comes with a taskbar, system tray, and clock by default.

Maybe Awesome is more stable now, but one of the reasons that I (and people I know) gave up on Awesome was how often the configuration interface changed, even once they switched it to Lua, the API would change between point releases.

If I upgrade from XMonad 0.9 => 0.10, I don't have to completely redo my config file, because a good portion of the API has changed.

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