Run a GNOME 3.x session but use awesome for window management.
Unfortunately, I don't use awesome anymore as my daily driver and GNOME tends to break things from time to time so there is a chance this may work on your system or not all. But if you have for example fixes or enhancements feel free to send a PR, I will test and verify those and I will merge them.
My latest test was with awesome 4.3-2 (Build Date: 31 Jul 2020) and GNOME 3.36.6 on September 2020.
Without the people on this list this Project would probably not work at all and will eat your lunch.
The scripts in this repository create a new session in GDM called "awesome GNOME". The requirements are gnome-flashback and awesome 4.3. Earlier versions of awesome don't integrate well with GTK and are sort of buggy.
Because gnome-flashback isn't always packaged you might need grab a copy of it from somewhere. Below you can find packages and repositories that worked for me.
sudo pacman -Syu gnome-flashback gnome gnome-icon-theme gnome-icon-theme-extras
dnf copr enable victoroliveira/gnome-flashback
dnf install gnome-flashback
sudo apt-get install gnome gnome-flashback gnome-icon-theme gnome-themes-extra make
Run the following with if you have sudo installed
sudo make install
sudo make uninstall
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What I recommend is that your session manager unlocks the GNOME Keyring on login. Otherwise you maybe have the pleasure to enter your password twice or more which can be anoying. See here to get an idea how to do that.
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There is a User report that the files you find here are not working on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. Until I had the chance to investigate that you are on your own.