[qznc]

I live in terminal and browser almost exclusively, but I still want a full desktop environment. I switched to Mate on my old laptop, because Unity and Gnome3 need to much resources. I tried others (XFCE, LXDE, ...) but they lacked little features like:

* hibernate when closing lid

* cpu/mem/network visualization in top/bottom bar

* clean theme without much fiddling

* mute/unmute via hardware button

And the rest I forgot. I can live with some issues, but it compounds on the less popular DEs.

All those issue apply to Awesome as well. DE is much more than managing windows. A long time ago, I used various tiling window managers, but always ran the various Gnome background services as well.

[majewsky]

> * hibernate when closing lid

This is actually systemd territory today.

(One of the reasons why I like systemd in practice. They may run counter to the Unix philosophy in every possible way, but at least shit now works the same across nearly all distros and desktops.)

[ac29]

>(XFCE, LXDE, ...) but they lacked little features like: * hibernate when closing lid * cpu/mem/network visualization in top/bottom bar * clean theme without much fiddling * mute/unmute via hardware button

All of those are possible with XFCE. Technically I think the mute/unmute thing comes through ACPI or something -- it works in any DE I've used.

[digi_owl]

On my desktop i have a mute key on the keyboard, and it shows up in X11 as a special key. From there i have set the XFCE keyboard manager to run some ALSA commands on pressing it to toggle the mute state of the master volume control.

Works fine, but then i do not have any transitory (USB) audio devices.

I suspect the lid close can be bound similarly (but these days you have the whole crapola of powerkit/powerd depending on systemd-logind handling the gruntwork, so who really knows).