Survey 2009

About
This is the first survey about awesome. It is available here.

Results
Results are available here.

Analysis

 * Most known awesome via forums, Google, friend IRC, and Planet Debian or Freedesktop.
 * 50 % does not communicate with others awesome users, and 33% of them use mailing-lists.
 * 75 % are up-to-date with the latest version (including git).
 * More than 50 % are using awesome for more than 1 year. The other 50 % are less than one year. Only 5 % are using since the last 6 months.
 * 75 % get awesome from their distros.
 * Almost everyone is using GNU/Linux.
 * A lot of our users were using GNOME, Fluxbox, KDE, Openbox or ion.
 * 2/3 thinks awesome is easy to use, 1/3 not that easy.
 * Wiki and manpages are the most used documentation to use awesome.
 * Only 40 % find awesome easy to configure. 15 % thinks it's hard.
 * Again, wiki and manpages are very used to configure awesome.
 * 75 % of users are proficient with their configuration.
 * 2/3 thinks awesome is getting easier to configure.
 * tabulous, telak and invaders have almost no users.

Finally, only 1 % is unhappy with awesome, 16 % quite happy and 83 % totally happy.

Suggested usability improvements
Most relevant stuff have been counted. It may not be exact though, it's just an idea.


 * 47 times: improve documentation and examples
 * 24 times: do not break configuration file format / API
 * 4 times: add tab support
 * 3 times: integrate shifty into awesome

Suggested missing features
There is a lot of documentation request, etc, that I ignored. I already counted many above. If you are not happy with these answers or you want more, go deep in the results. I saved the one I found interesting.


 * 4 times: coffee maker
 * 4 times: tabs
 * 3 times: more themes / color / pixmaps / prettier
 * 2 times: Scratchpad
 * 2 times: integrate shifty / dynamic tagging
 * Pony
 * Screen index with XRandR
 * Freedesktop compatible menu system
 * Help for debugging
 * Desktop icons
 * Wmii-like layouts, and all sort of layouts
 * Subtiling
 * Typing the name of a menu entry run it
 * GNOME/KDE applets support

Conclusion

 * We probably need to be more visible.
 * Mailing list is a good communication channel.
 * Most of our users are using awesome for a long time, we do not get new users that much.
 * Most of our users do not seem to come from the tiling window manager world.
 * We still need to ease configuration.
 * We need to get rid of tabulous, telak and invaders since they are not used.
 * We need to remove almost unused feature from at least the default configuration files to lighten it up.