Don't you want to make blog post about your setup or something?

I love Linux, but I don't like Gnome Shell or Unity (or KDE or something), and on Desktop it's easy, you just install awesome and run with it. But for a few years I had only laptop, and I was always afraid that things like sleep, or volume and brightness control keys woudn't work, because they seem to be tied with Gnome for some reason.

If you could share some more about your setup, that would be great.

Oh, you can start the gnome-settings-daemon with your WM and you get the sleep, the keys, the nice fonts etc. from Ubuntu.

Most of the stuff is here. Sorry for the messy emacs configuration, I'm just studying it after ~10 years of vim.

https://github.com/pimeys/dotfiles

Also, two branches: work and macbook. The screenshot is from the work branch.

You might want to try Xmonad. It's a tiling window manager that's extremely extensible and very fast/clean to use.

Here's an old demo of it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyNkBLhIpQk

I'm in that screenshot! How weird is this?

Looks like you're using Xmonad. I use it as well; it's the reason I switched to linux. It's unbelievable how nice it is to stop fussing around with overlapping windows! Combine that with all of the extensibility and you've got an incredibly productive environment (assuming you don't get caught up yak-shaving your xmonad.hs).

Weirdly enough whenever I have tried to use a minimal tiling WM the Window redraws become horrifically slow, whereas Unity with all the eye candy cranked up is smooth as silk.

Not for me :(. I like having eye candy, even though it does give a lot of distractions.

Depends what's eye candy for you. For me it's pure solarized colors and lots of terminals open... :)