the-glorious-dotfiles VS picom

Awesome is very different from other window managers...It's a framework window manager! Through its API you can create widgets that are not possible in other WMs (ex: [1],[2],[3].[4]). Furthermore, AwesomeWM can be used as a tiling window managers and as a stacking window managers (like XFCE).

Yes it is possible to do with Awesome API, some examples: https://github.com/rxyhn/yoru#ocean--gallery https://github.com/AlphaTechnolog/dotfiles/tree/awesomewm https://github.com/manilarome/the-glorious-dotfiles https://github.com/Kasper24/KwesomeDE

I have a popup volume slider whenever I hit a keybind, learnt from glorious's awesomewm

like this? https://github.com/manilarome/the-glorious-dotfiles

I 'm assuming you created the "switch_stop" tag? Unless, you're changing the taglist names (I don't see any purpose for the "id = switch_stop"). The tag names or 'id' in this context can be found here, https://github.com/manilarome/the-glorious-dotfiles/blob/master/config/awesome/linear/configuration/tags/init.lua .

I would also recommend read through other ppls configurations on GitHub like Manilarome, JavaCafe or even mine which I think are pretty decent

https://github.com/manilarome/the-glorious-dotfiles https://github.com/CSAndrew/MacOSM

Start exploring official documentation, there is section about default configuration. You can also take a look at existing themes like awesome-copycats or manilaromes glorious dotfiles and see how they do things and start experimenting.

What distro? My pref is for Jonaburg's fork. Ibhagwan is out of date. Pijulius more so. Yshui doesn't have animation.

This configuration uses Qtile extra package and one of my favourite picom fork for minimalistic look with rounded-corners

As others have said, Awesome doesn't ship with a compositor so you need one yourself. My choice is jonaburg's picom fork for the extra included features, but regular picom will do the job.

Install jonaburg picom https://github.com/jonaburg/picom

picom-jonaburg has rounded corners and animations. Window gaps are controlled by your window manager, compositors can't interact with them.

Offtopic: I know you didn't ask this, but I just saw the fork you are using was updated the last time in 2020: https://github.com/jonaburg/picom/tags . The current version of the original https://github.com/yshui/picom/releases got updated this year (2 years more development!). Unless you are using features that is only available in that fork, I would try the mainline, which also got some of these features too, in example support for rounding corners. So maybe this newer version works better.

I am using Qtile (on a Laptop running Ubuntu 20.04), with jonaburg-picom, which is blurring my Qtile bar since some parts of it are configured to be transparent. How do I get rid of that blur, can someone help me with this?

This is how I do it with awesomeWM on EndeavourOS. Maybe this will help you. I'm using picom-jonaburg-git.