[siddboots]

I've been using i3 for about two years. I sampled a few other tiling WMs, including awesome, before settling on i3. Realistically there isn't much difference between them in terms of the features that I personally use, but these are the main things that sealed it for me:

* Tree-based/hierarchical tiling.

* Simple as hell multi-monitor.

* Beautiful config file [1].

* JSON API [2]

* Modal, vim-like key bindings.

[1] http://code.stapelberg.de/git/i3/tree/i3.config [2] http://i3wm.org/docs/ipc.html

[m_ram]

I haven't used i3, but I did use awesome for about a year before settling on Xfce. The thing all the tiling window managers don't have is a compositor. I don't care about shadows or animations, but it makes everything seem smoother and faster. The compositor in Xfce uses xrender instead of opengl, so it works pretty well even on low-end machines.