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