After being a Linux user for almost 3 years, I feel that the most miserable time I had was my ricing period.

I wasn’t enjoying to rely mainly on GUI, so I dropped GNOME (yes, I tried KDE and I hated it) and I started using i3 with a basic configuration. It took a couple of days to get used to it, but after the initial setback I started to really like using a tiling window manager, I had only set up notifications with dunst and left dmenu as launcher.
The problem was: it looked awful.

I started to look for something that could make it look good, and polybar and rofi came up. Now I had 4 pieces of software that needed individual configuration and individual themes. I think you know where this is going.
I went down the ricing rabbit hole and I started to tweak everything, starting from configurations I had found on GitHub or r/unixporn, then customizing it multiple times, getting furious for the dumbest imperfections, losing hours or even days to make the smallest improvement in UI, until I settled for a decent and clean configuration which I used for quite some time. Obviously I was still tweaking something from time to time and I was feeling really bad for losing my time for this sort of things.

Then I saw awesome on my friend’s laptop and it looked pretty simple and clean, with just about everything you would need for your environment. I decided to give it a try, and I was surprised at how little time it took me to configure it and customize it, all of this is lua, a real programming language which made everything easier and more organized. Awesome offers an API to configure keybindings, terminal, status bar, keyboard and so on. The notifications are handled by awesome, the launcher is built in and the status bar is heavily customizable and good looking. I installed a couple widgets from here, changed the color scheme (but the default one is good) and I was done. It took me less than an hour to configure everything, I didn’t have to install rofi, polybar, dunst and configure them one by one, there was just awesome doing its job at being awesome.

Now someone pointed that awesome is more of a DE than a WM, since it builds in a couple pieces of software, but I disagree, it just gets rid of the most tedious jobs of setting up a WM and it still feels light and responsive as any other window manager besides having a much better tiling system compared to i3 in my opinion. If you’d like more control over your setup you could still use a classic window manager like bspwm or i3wm, but if you want my opinion, just give awesome a try before you start losing your time.