I tried KDE and it’s really great but independent workspaces are still work in progress. For me that’s a deal breaker. When those are done I will definitely consider it. With gnome I was able to setup workspaces on one monitor and have a single workspace on the others which is better then what KDE is doing. I don’t think you can make them fully independent.
I don’t think you should be that worried about tiling. In awesome you can switch between tiling and floating windows (per workspace), you can set rules for specific windows or just make floating the default. You can make some apps always go fullscreen. It’s not really that confusing.
Learning curve for awesome is pretty much the learning curve for Lua. All configuration is just Lua scripts. The great part is that you can change pretty much everything. The not so great part is that to change anything you have to dig in Lua. When I switched I did a really deep dive and pretty much spend all of my free time writing scripts for couple of weeks. So yeah, it’s work but the level to which you can customize everything is simply amazing. “I want this widget to display a popup on hover instead of click.” 30 seconds and it’s done. Custom widgets are super easy. Custom bars, different bars per monitor, different bars for different number of displays (think laptop with and without external screens); all super easy.
I tried KDE and it’s really great but independent workspaces are still work in progress. For me that’s a deal breaker. When those are done I will definitely consider it. With gnome I was able to setup workspaces on one monitor and have a single workspace on the others which is better then what KDE is doing. I don’t think you can make them fully independent.
I don’t think you should be that worried about tiling. In awesome you can switch between tiling and floating windows (per workspace), you can set rules for specific windows or just make floating the default. You can make some apps always go fullscreen. It’s not really that confusing.
Learning curve for awesome is pretty much the learning curve for Lua. All configuration is just Lua scripts. The great part is that you can change pretty much everything. The not so great part is that to change anything you have to dig in Lua. When I switched I did a really deep dive and pretty much spend all of my free time writing scripts for couple of weeks. So yeah, it’s work but the level to which you can customize everything is simply amazing. “I want this widget to display a popup on hover instead of click.” 30 seconds and it’s done. Custom widgets are super easy. Custom bars, different bars per monitor, different bars for different number of displays (think laptop with and without external screens); all super easy.