While I also prefer a tiling WM, the fragmentation of desktop environments still managers to affect me. Despite an abundance of options for basic applications like file managers, everything I've tried leaves something to be desired, often something that another option gets right. If developers would focus on just a few choices with incompatible philosophies, even people who didn't use their DE would benefit.

I live in terminal and browser almost exclusively, but I still want a full desktop environment. I switched to Mate on my old laptop, because Unity and Gnome3 need to much resources. I tried others (XFCE, LXDE, ...) but they lacked little features like:

* hibernate when closing lid

* cpu/mem/network visualization in top/bottom bar

* clean theme without much fiddling

* mute/unmute via hardware button

And the rest I forgot. I can live with some issues, but it compounds on the less popular DEs.

All those issue apply to Awesome as well. DE is much more than managing windows. A long time ago, I used various tiling window managers, but always ran the various Gnome background services as well.

> * hibernate when closing lid

This is actually systemd territory today.

(One of the reasons why I like systemd in practice. They may run counter to the Unix philosophy in every possible way, but at least shit now works the same across nearly all distros and desktops.)

>(XFCE, LXDE, ...) but they lacked little features like: * hibernate when closing lid * cpu/mem/network visualization in top/bottom bar * clean theme without much fiddling * mute/unmute via hardware button

All of those are possible with XFCE. Technically I think the mute/unmute thing comes through ACPI or something -- it works in any DE I've used.

On my desktop i have a mute key on the keyboard, and it shows up in X11 as a special key. From there i have set the XFCE keyboard manager to run some ALSA commands on pressing it to toggle the mute state of the master volume control.

Works fine, but then i do not have any transitory (USB) audio devices.

I suspect the lid close can be bound similarly (but these days you have the whole crapola of powerkit/powerd depending on systemd-logind handling the gruntwork, so who really knows).

My personal conclusion is always the same: I always come back to Windowmaker. Every single time I use another DE, no matter how shiny it is (and they are truly beautiful when you open them for the first time), I face half-baked applications, many bugs, and basically half of the stuff is fucked up with each update.

So I stick to Windowmaker. I don't even really use its DE part, I use it as a WM mostly. It gives me terminals and other windows, and that's all I need. I don't even tweak it as I use to do 15 (or perhaps a bit more) years ago. It's fine for me as it is.

Been poking at Icewm for a similar reason.

And now i wonder about the state of Afterstep...