>>Software with a focus on simplicity, clarity, and frugality.
>The developers also pride themselves on catering to advanced and experienced computer users,
But, no. It's a drumbeat of less code and fewer features. Which is only simple in a specific worse is better sense and frequently infrugal because efficiency would require more code.
Advanced and experienced computer users are not catered to, not catering to anyone who might need a feature is their whole schtick.
> The developers also pride themselves on catering to advanced and experienced computer users, which is actually a refreshing take in my opinion
Am I too old?
My first linux install took me days to get to the point of showing a desktop. Not catering to advanced users is the novelty in the linux world imo - and it’s not entirely there yet.
As much as I like suckless software (not necessarily the community) it is a pretty contentless article:
- I like Suckless
- I like Alpine
- I like Void more now
- Here's a script
While I agree with the basic idea, it seems that in practice it's been taken over by ascetes who throw the baby out with the bath water and impose pointless restrictions on themselves just for signalling.
If you want software to have less complexity, you don't choose a language which gives you options, you choose one which removes ways to make mistakes. That means, emphatically, not C. You don't have to choose Rust, which is complex indeed, but allows your code to be less difficult. If you want strictness, choose Haskell. Or maybe go the middle way and do OCaml. Or maybe Ada.
I don't understand how the suckless community goes from "vulnerabilities are commonplace" and calling out masterminds to writing C, which is famously difficult to code without stepping into undefined behaviour.
Or maybe I do: this checks out if minimalism is more important than vulnerabilities and simplicity.
Similar criticism can be applied to sticking to X11 compared to Wayland, regarding vulnerabilities (any application can see any other) and performance (any application can block the entire server - try ssh -X on a high latency connection to see).
Suckless can work well if you do things alone and uniquely within text, but when it is time to collaborate in three-dimensional space, you'll find yourself hiding your cringe "Suckless" desktop like a dirty little secret on TTY2. Because who wants to be that guy in the office? Imagine swiveling around to a bewildered colleague, who just watched you struggle to zoom in, scroll down or resize a window. Imagine having to explain to them what they're looking at.
Suckless also leads to wild misconceptions about your ability. It has the minimalist and snappy aesthetic of a hacker wunderkind's monitor, even though you're secretly doing equivalent work to everyone else within this setup, often at a reduced rate due to compatibility issues with the rest of your department. So what then? People start saying things like, "Oh, that Mike really knows what he's doing. Have you seen how bonkers his screen looks?" That's a lot to live up to.
Here's an interesting experiment: Pick a random Suckless fanboy on YouTube. Skim through one of their videos. Then skim through another video from 9 months before. Notice how everything about their work-setup constantly changes. These guys never learn to let things lie, never learn about the power of habits and the unique human ability to adapt to almost any interface, rather than forcing their immediate surroundings into a narrow stencil. Flow with it.
I’ve always really loved suckless. Only thing I don’t do is dwm. I’ve always preferred evilwm with dmenu.
xmonad pairs nicely with the suckless `dmenu`.
For the programs I most frequently launch from my desktop, I have hotkey sequences that do a switch-to-this-program-window-or-start-the-program-if-not-running. For the remaining programs, `dmenu`.
, ((mod3Mask, xK_f), raiseNextMaybe (spawn "/usr/bin/firefox-esr") (className =? "Firefox-esr"))
I doubt that his installer is useful for other users than bt.
installer.sh:
mkdir /home/bt/.suckless
cd /home/bt/.suckless
No, no, no. Suckless’s tiling window manager has no config. To change anything you must recompile and relaunch. Wtf?? What kind of ethos is that?
- slock & doas zzz
- slim + dwm
- bc/dc + gnuplot
- mpv + yt-dlp
- ImageMagick/sox/ffmpeg
It's been a while since I've looked into it, but most minimal WMs that I've tried fall over completely on high DPI displays from a lack of a global zoom setting.
Maybe my eyes are just getting bad (I'm ~30) but the lack of that accessibility it makes them unusable for me.
Suckless comes up every so often and then it goes on to politics about the Suckless people.
I really like the idea of Suckless, I wish the people involved with it directly addresses what to me seems to be a disturbing political slant at their conferences.
Of course, you can ignore that an just use the software. Or better yet look for other similar software created by people that are apolitical.
OpenBSD seems to be a place that does its best to be minimal, and their network setup to me is far better then anything else in Linux or the other BSDs.
I love the suckless philosophy, but their tools are very hit and miss.
st is my favorite terminal, and I use it daily. It crashes from time to time, but it's manageable.
I used surf as my main browser for a few years, until it refused to compile with the latest WebKitGTK a couple of years ago. I switched to Luakit, and have been mostly happy with the transition.
dwm was unusable for me the few times I tried it. It would crash constantly, and it just doesn't have the features of other lightweight WMs, even with all the patches. I settled on bspwm many years ago, and it's been rock solid.
rofi is better than dmenu. sxlock is better than slock.
I think OP will hit many roadblocks with this all-in suckless approach. There are better tools out there that are similarly lightweight, but with much better UX. You can save yourself many headaches by being pragmatic, and using the right tool for the job.