It was surprisingly hard to record this process on a VM because I kept accidentally locking myself out via firewall rules
OPNsense (sensibly) makes it hard to access the admin interface over the admin interface, but that’s what I wanted to do since I was testing on a VM that wasn’t actually protecting anything
I 90% like it a lot, but a few things are still frustrating
What I like
My screen isn’t just a mess of windows anymore.
I’m not constantly Alt-Tabbing to find the window I want. I can keep a workspace set up how I want and just jump by hotkey
I’m making better use of my screen real estate
Thinking in terms of desktops makes me more focused
I can resume from sleep reliably, which wasn’t true of Gnome
What I dislike
Often, when I click something that spawns a browser or other window, and it opens in a different desktop
It’s written in Lua, a language I don’t know
The configuration is super verbose and complicated, but LLMs can do it for me, mostly
I don’t understand how people describe it as “beginner friendly”
None of the default layouts feel useful to me
Again, I was able to define new ones with LLMs
My build-test loop is pretty slow because I have to build my entire NixOS config then restart awesome
When Awesome fails, the error is in a window that you can’t seem to copy/paste, and it disappears when you click on it. I can’t find logs for it.
When a hotkey fails, it doesn’t produce any output anywhere, so I have some hotkeys that just don’t work
It doesn’t detect when you have conflicting hotkeys, so it just lets you define duplicates, and then they don’t work how you expect
There are certain programs like KeePassXC or gnome-calculator that I just want to be able to summon to the current desktop and then hide, but I’m not sure how to do that.
Sometimes, I want to have just a floating terminal for a one-off command, but I don’t know how to do that.
I don’t have as good a screen recorder or screenshotter as gnome screen recorder
When it fails, it falls back to the default config rather than the last good config, so I kind of have to care about the default keybindings
Refactored my Nix files to put Gnome-specific settings in their own file
This makes it easier to swap between Gnome and Awesome for testing
Stopped using the open-source (“Nouveau”) NVIDIA drivers
I thought they were supposed to have better compatibility, but they apparently have worse compatibility
I suspect that the NVIDIA open source drivers were why about 5% of the time, my computer couldn’t turn my Samsung Odyssey G9 back on after suspend
Added virt-viewer to standard packages on my main desktop
