Awesome v. fvwm

If you're an fvwm user, you will probably lament the documentation of Awesome. Configuring anything in Awesome required reading the Lua API docs, which in my experience left something to be desired. I found it interesting that Danjou said Awesome is nearing maturity, because I didn't think the docs were one of a mature application.

Fvwm on the other hand has superb documentation. Having used GNOME, KDE, xmonad, awesome, and a little bit of fluxbox, I have landed on fvwm. It has the best documentation, the most stability, and the least bugs--zero that I have found. Xmonad was nice but it practically required keyboard usage--it's hard to even configure things like window decorations. I like the keyboard but the mouse shouldn't be second class. I found some bugs in xmonad that would cause the window manager to completely lock up. Awesome's documentation is not the best, and it suffered from bugs as well--I had some problems with decorations on floating windows, for example.

The only thing I miss on fvwm is automatic tiling. However, FvwmRearrange allows tiling at the press of a button. Since I now use a lot of desktops (20) I find I don't have much need to rearrange windows automatically because each desk has the windows arranged as I need them. FvwmPager makes it easy and manageable to use a huge number of desktops.

If you already know fvwm I don't think you'll gain much from trying awesome. I also urge new users to try fvwm. It's not very hip--maybe because it is old--but for configurability, stability, and documentation it can't be beat.