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I have awesome installed both on Ubuntu 17.10 and Debian 9. Awesome under Ubuntu looks like Ubuntu default theme; awesome under Debian looks like MATE (I have multiple window managers installed but it seems MATE is default). My questions are:

  1. If there would be no desktop environment installed, how awesome will look? Is it still be able to render gui applications? Let's say, I am interested in Arch Linux.
  2. Is it possible to make context menu look like default awesome menu? It is very fast and, you know, it is good to keep things consistent.
  3. Does awesome (or i3wm) use nvidia driver? I have some glitches while scrolling the page in a browser (no matter which browser). It is like blurred line over text which appears only when I scroll using mouse wheel (moving scrollbar does no effect). Sorry, byzanz have not caught this.
  4. Fonts in both distributions in awesome look thinner. Any idea to make fonts look better?
Evgeniy
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[meta] Awesome does not set the GTK theme. It is totally outside of the project scope and is done by either a background daemon provided by the distribution of a bunch of configuration file.

You have to understand that Awesome is not a DE and that it doesn't do DE things like setting GTK/Qt themes or running background daemons for various common tasks (display, network, sound, power). All of these tasks are performed by 3rd party components that are not part of AwesomeWM and do not interact with it.

DEs and distributions do a lot of magic while Awesome and other WMs (i3wm, OpenBOX, dmw) only provide a limited set of feature. This is done by design and even if such DE features were proposed to those WMs, they would be rejected as out of scope. Awesome provides a lot more features than other WMs, but still doesn't intend to become a DE.

  1. GUI application will work on all Linux distribution and all WMs if they are installed properly.
  2. Yes, you can write a theme or play with the GTK CSS to make things look consistent. It is out of scope of the Awesome project. However note that Actionless wrote a GTK theme, see https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/issues/1560
  3. The display driver is chosen by the X server and the kernel, not by Awesome.
  4. Install new fonts. This is not related to Awesome either.

The Arch Linux Wiki has a lot of good documentation on all the topics touched by your question.

On a final note, if you want to make Awesome itself prettier, look at how other users did it:

https://github.com/awesomeWM/awesome/issues/1395

Emmanuel Lepage Vallee
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  • First of all, thank you for clarification. Do not get me wrong, I do not want to make awesome look like gnome or Ubuntu (which now is actually the same gnome). I was wondering how awesome will look on Arch, for instance, because I do not know how the default X theme look like. I do not like how gnome look or MATE, or Plasma. I think, opensource is not about design and I will customize awesome wm in the future as much as I can, that is why I have installed it. You do not have any issues with rendering in any tiling wm, do you? – Evgeniy Jan 11 '18 at 11:49
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For those who have the same problem when scrolling a web page. I have fixed this by installing compton composite manager. Do not forget to add compton --daemon to your ~/.xinitrc file.

Evgeniy
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If you like to use themes, monitor settings, mouse and keyboard settings, dpi and font-settings of Xfce for your gnome and GTK applications inside a window manager like awesome, i3, dwm, etc...

You can easily run xfsettingsd on your wm startup section by running xfsettingsd all of your themes and settings of xfce can be applied to your window manager of your choice

Now you can get rid of .Xresources file as well

Side Note

It's obvious that you need to have xfce4 installed in your pc/laptop and then running xfsettings.

SdSaati
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