[bitwize]

Awesome is nice, but is much more heavyweight. It depends on Lua, and the dialect of its configuration file changes.

i3wm has no such dependencies, covers 80% of awesome's use cases, and is stable.

[Bjoern]

What kind of things does Awesome excel at what i3 can't or doesn't do well? (Awesome user here)

[lake99]

I have dabbled with many WMs, including i3. I have settled on awesome. These are the shortcomings of i3 for my usage.

1. Multimonitor. i3 has 9 tags that are shared between all attached monitors. So, if you have 3 monitors, the distribution of tags may turn out to be [1,4,5,6], [2,8], [3,7,9]. You can move tags from monitor to monitor, but AFAIK, you can't exceed 9. I have a habit of keeping email, browser, music player, and chat program on one tab each. So, this limitation of 9 tags just kills it for me.

2. awesome has better placement of floating windows.

3. Vertical task/status bar. This is a minor issue, but I wish i3 comes with one.

If i3 fixes these things, I'd switch to it in a heartbeat. i3 has a saner config, and a much more elegant tiling layout.

[bitwize]

You can certainly have more than 9 tags on i3. In fact you can have tags with arbitrary names. They are a bit more difficult to manage with the default config, because only the default 9 have keybindings. But you can create your own tags and bind keys to assign windows to them or switch to them with a custom config.

You can also use a tabbed window layout (Super + E) to keep multiple programs full-screen on one tag. Then you can switch between them with the tabs at the top or Super + J, Super + ;.