> * 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).
* 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.