I’m planning to switch to EndeavourOS in the near future. My objective is to have AwesomeWM as the window manager and I see that in the community editions there is a support for AwesomeWM in the github page, but it’s not pinned, it’s not prometed and published in the main website and there is no subcategory in this forum under Desktop Environments.
For this reasons, I’m a little bit worried to install it because my top priority is reliability of my system. Is there a recommended way to install your amazing distro with AwesomeWM or do you advise to use another WM because EnOS is not yet ready (and well supported) in combination with AwesomeWM?
What distro are you on currently? If you like it, stick with it. Otherwise you should try a few “live” things for a few days to see how it fits for you. “A little bit worried” out of thousands of people, especially comfortable on Windows, is the reason why eg. Manjaro has three “official” D.E. flavors which are GNOME, KDE and XFCE.
Now I’m not familiar only with “window managers” without desktops. Tried Openbox for Porteus but didn’t like it, didn’t let me set screen brightness lower, the laptop I use could waste power like crazy and zap my eyes on maximum brightness.
Now EndeavourOS, as you might already know, has a close relation to Arch. It means reliability includes updating regularly, and getting plenty of information about a certain app/package before installing it. If you’re a Linux beginner, it might be better to try Fedora or Ubuntu for a little while until you get comfortable with it, including using the terminal and knowing some commands from there, before going into EndeavourOS.
There is no EndeavourOS AwesomeWM Community Edition currently maintained.
However, that doesn’t mean that you cannot use AwesomeWM with EndeavourOS. AwesomeWM is in the Arch repos and there are many Arch users who use it. It’s as reliable as it gets.
You just need to install it and configure it manually. The best way to start is to install EndeavourOS without a desktop environment and then follow the instructions on the Arch Wiki:
Hello and welcome! I am not sure what your experience is with Arch, or what distro you are currently using. This is my first go at Arch, I was always a Debian guy before. So I can understand the concern about reliability. I know when I was just a wee Debian users I had always heard the myth that rolling release was like the wild wild west for these amazing Linux power users. With the rolling release there is the risk of something happening. But I do think the fixes come pretty quick with Arch and the community is fantastic about helping out if you put in the effort to learn and try to troubleshoot and give details about what is going on with your system. I made the switch because I wanted to learn more about Linux and I felt that being more command line focused and with the rolling release I would have to learn more. And I have no regrets making the switch. The only issue I had was a kernel upgrade that took out my wifi. I was fortunate that it was late so I went to bed and was going to look into more in the morning but I just ran another upgrade once I woke up and it was fixed. I think if something like that happens to me again I will just downgrade and wait for the fix to come out. And I am by no means a power user, I am just a basic user. If you install any of the DE versions you can always install Awesome as your WM, I have XFCE and switched my WM to Openbox. Or you could go for the AwesomeWM only one that is in the community edition. Either way I think the AwesomeWM option you choose would work out. If you aren’t sure you could also put it in a virtual machine and give it a little joyride and see how it feels. Best of luck
Thank you for the tips and infos. At the moment I’m using Manjaro with gnome and previously I was on Ubuntu. Currently I’m really enjoying my time with Manjaro but I see a lot of problems with the devs (https://manjarno.snorlax.sh/) and the supports, thus my necessity to change distro. Sorry for not be accurate on the fact that I’m a newbie with EnOS but I’m familiar with arch-based distros.
Ehi! Thank you for the reply. I’ll try with the manual installation.
I’m just a little bit worried about how difficult it could be. I saw some guides on installing AwesomeWM and make it work is pretty easy, but if there was a Community Edition before, I thought that there are some “hidden” configurations to do that only an experienced and expert user could do properly. I would avoid to setup my machine incorrectly from the start with something as essential as the WM.
Thank you for the journey, I think that I’m having a similar experience but with Manjaro. I really enjoy what arch brings (rolling release, the AUR, a beautiful community, etc) but I never installed an entire WM in a fresh distro and I don’t want to mess something up, not realizing the mistake and a year later while I’m at work a break completely the system without finding the problem (because like you, I’m just a basic user, not a power one).
Seeing that you are on Manjaro that is helpful in that you are familiar with some Arch stuff. If you go the route of installing a DE version and switching the WM then your DE of choice may have good documentation on how to do that. I had never used XFCE before, but I went with it because it is so lightweight and configurable. They explain how to swap WM in their documentation. I was lucky because openbox was compatible with the replace command and I just saved my session and it has had no issues. But they give some more details on other ways to change it. It could still be worth testing it out in a virtual machine just to make sure you don’t break anything else if you are concerned. I know as a basic user I certainly don’t want to break something that I don’t know how to fix. https://wiki.xfce.org/howto/other_window_manager
Personally I would install the EndeavourOS Xfce Edition and then I would install AwesomeWM.
At login you can choose which environment you use; select AwesomeWM and that’s it.
Later you can either leave Xfce present or get rid of it. Just make sure you don’t remove 90% of the distribution by accidentally removing a metapackage with a lot of packages included!
Thank you for the suggestion, but I would try with a “clean” start without too many packages that I don’t use and that I need to remove. But I think it’s a good solution for anyone else that is interested in EnOS with AwesomeWM and doesn’t want to install EnOS without any DE or WM already there.
