10 ms·

Why I Use Suckless Tools

238 points by martinhath 6y ago

hhmc 6y ago
> If something goes wrong while using them, you can easily jump right into the code that implements them and nail down issues using basic debugger skills. I feel like we have very different conceptions of what 'easily' fixing a configuration issue looks like.
- tarruda 6y ago
  From the implementation POV, suckless software is very simple, and this makes it easier not only to tweak configuration (which is usually done C headers through defines), but also any kind of customization you might need. Take their window manager dwm as an example. The codebase is only 2000 lines long, so any bug you find will have to be hidden in those 2000 lines. If you take a Sunday afternoon to study the code, you will very likely understand how every piece of the software works, at which point you will be in a position to fix anything you might find. You might even end up forking it and implementing your own window manager (AwesomeWM was originally forked from Dwm).
  - ryanmjacobs 6y ago
    This comment strikes home. The "bug-space" is so much smaller, and definitely possible for a lone newcomer to grasp in a day or two
    - ken 6y ago
      A window manager may be only 2000 lines of source code but it implements a host of formal and informal standards and interacts with hundreds of other programs on my computer. You may need only a day or two to orient yourself to the source code, but that’s on top of months or years of experience with X11R6 and ICCCMv2 and EWMH and such. How much debugging did you first need to do to discover your current issue was even in dwm? EDIT: I especially love the phrasing in Wikipedia's ICCCM article: dwm "can be configured for compliance". If 'configuration' can include editing source code, I'm sure that's true!
      - ryanmjacobs 6y ago
        I agree to an extent. I'll admit, there is much more under the surface of dwm that 2000 lines of source code. It's all abstractions in the end. But Gnome and KDE are more likely to have bugs because they cover such a wide scope. I've never had dwm fail to do what it claimed to do. But I have had weird Gnome glitches with taskbar hovering and window dragging with workspaces, etc. Dwm "wins" by just giving up, in a sense. It doesn't try to implement a taskbar, therefore it cannot have a buggy taskbar. EDIT: I guess it does have a "Taskbar", but in a very, very limited scope.
        RMPR 6y ago
        iirc Dwm doesn't have a "taskbar", at least by default, there's a patch for that.
        ryanmjacobs 6y ago
        Yeah, I guess a better word is "statusbar" or "workspace bar". It just displays the currently selected workspaces, the current window's title, and dwmstatus. The point is that it doesn't try to manage buttons and icons for minimize/maximize/multiple-stacked window types etc, like a traditional window manager
  - ilitirit 6y ago
    > If you take a Sunday afternoon to study the code, you will very likely understand how every piece of the software works, at which point you will be in a position to fix anything you might find. You might even end up forking it and implementing your own window manager (AwesomeWM was originally forked from Dwm). I don't think I have ever needed to do this "fix" any piece of configuration in any software. While I understand the concept and approach, I don't think that this is a productive use of most people's time.
    - noobermin 6y ago
      Be a little charitable to OP and this reply. The configuration is indeed in code but it's macro defines. It's essentially as simple as changing a text configuration file, it's not like you have to actually edit code (as in new functions, adding actual logic). Things like fonts and sizes and colors is changing defines, it's actually simple. Now when it comes to more complex stuff, like hotkeys, well you're essentially programming already in most other wms that doesn't have such things build in. AwesomeWM, i3, qtile (not popular but I used it for years) basically is half-way to programming, although it's a line, so it isn't any worse. I think the thing people aren't getting is the code is actually simple, so editing it and recompiling it isn't a chore.
      - ilitirit 6y ago
        I actually am quite familiar with suckless tools and I do consider myself an advanced user, so I'm probably part of their target market as well. But to be honest, from a pragmatic point of view I just don't see how configuration through code is better/worse than configuration through dot/json/ini files in the average "suckless" use-case. Why must this even be something that I care about? If it's a case of their software being simpler to understand so which makes it easier to fix bugs, then sure, I get that. But in my experience, software that has been around forever just tends to have fewer bugs in general so it's also just something else that I simply don't need to care about. And how often does the average user of suckless tools actually have to fix bugs in the programs? If it's more than once, then does the label "suck less" even qualify? Is it just because the software is extremely minimal and therefore less "bloated"? I get that too, but personally, why would I care if a piece of software is 70kb or 500kb in this age? YMMV. Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to bash suckless or any other community here. I'm just very pragmatic about the tools that I use and my workflow. If you're the type of person that likes to tinker and customize every aspect from the ground up, sure then maybe suckless tools are for you. Tinker and mod away, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.
sseneca 6y ago
I used st for a while but switched to kitty. kitty obviously has way more features (things like colour switching can be added to st, but requires messing with patches which I dislike, and dislike more than compiling on each configuration change). I've been using kitty for a few months now and performance is great. in fact, the biggest performance gain I saw was when I switched away from "oh my zsh" to a manually written `~/.zshrc`.
- tdy_err 6y ago
  Don't tell anybody where you placed your .zshrc- it's supposed to be a secret!
- knubie 6y ago
  On top of that, kitty’s window management / split pane features are way more performant than tmux’s, which contradicts one of the early points in the article about st.
jdub 6y ago
As much as possible, I try to use software created by kind communities. The behaviours and attitudes in the "suckless" world come across as combative, exclusive, and unpleasant.
- kamranjon 6y ago
  In what way are they combative or unpleasant? I've never experienced this. I enjoy the philosophy and opinionated approach they have to development. I setup an old thinkpad with openbsd and dwm and st and it all worked great and i learned some C along the way. I also used sent - their plaintext slide presentation tool to give a talk at work and it was a pretty cool way to put a presentation together quickly and focus on ideas. Anyway - I like their software and the opnionatedness makes it kinda fun to explore.
  - jdub 6y ago
    Start with the name. That puts it in opposition immediately. They present a lot of that opposition to projects and people, rarely stated kindly. They could express a positive enthusiasm for simplicity, but that's not the way they go about it.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      >Start with the name. That puts it in opposition immediately The name that immediately claims that their software sucks? I get where you are coming from, but you're just labeling the average software with a different term.
      - Certhas 6y ago
        It very very clearly implies that other software sucks and theirs sucks less. If there would be any ambiguity in this they explicitly bash genetic "other hackers" all throughout their philosophy page. It's not exactly subtle.
        6y ago
Havoc 6y ago
This caters to a very specific audience though. This particular concept while labelled suckless sounds like hell to me. To change a config I need to recompile stuff? Jikes To each their own though. I can see how this could work well if one invested a mountain of time into learning & fine-tuning it all
- tutfbhuf 6y ago
  > suckless tools having their configuration baked into the executable at compile time, they start up instantly I wonder how many milliseconds slower the startup of a C application will be, when it reads a config file from SSD first.
  - eeZah7Ux 6y ago
    Milliseconds? Probably less than one.
  - rejschaap 6y ago
    Yeah, reading a single file will not have a noticable impact, but we all know it will not stop at a single file. Before you know it a full blown web browser is included. The suckless philosophy is pretty extreme, but I'm grateful there are people exploring this space.
    - waheoo 6y ago
      Yea people seem to be quite critical of this when its not like they have to use it. Do people act this way if you do LFS?
    - mikepurvis 6y ago
      I think that's the key thing. It's not about config, it's the fact that the "plugins" are all compiled in as well— meanwhile over here in the real world we have there are entire programs and methodologies dedicated to managing directories of vimscript files, and sharing your personal dotfiles directory on github is a thing.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Macha 6y ago
I get that people enjoy very minimalist computer experiences, but startup time is hardly that different between these programs and other slightly more ergonomic programs which offer conveniences like a config file. If you look at my startup time for my system it goes something like this: 10s - waiting for monitor to wake up to pick OS at dual boot menu 15s - typing disk encryption password 15s - system uses disk encryption password to retrieve LUKS key 5s - Literally the entirety of my OS and window manager and autostart programs beginning. I use i3 for my window manager, which manages to launch instantly, and alt-enter launches alacritty for my terminal, which also launches instantly. But even heavier terminals like xfce4-terminal launch very quickly. These programs are lightweight sure, but they don't need to be recompiled for configuration and have some ergonomics. I don't see the marginal benefit of maybe 4s at boot time being worth that hassle.
- tutfbhuf 6y ago
  I completely agree. Suckless tools shouldn't be pedantic about C code minimalism. As per my definition, suckless tools are lightweight, KISS and offer some simple ergonomics. I find it nice to be able to scroll the terminal up, when I'm not inside of tmux.
- tarkin2 6y ago
  The main thing I loved about suckless and missed on OS X was DWM. Dealing with windows, even with the tiling aspects, hammerspoon to automate things, and playing around with configs to turn off all the animation, on OS X I was still much more productive using DWM.
- xiwenc 6y ago
  Stronger yet I rarely reboot my systems. Either they run 24/7 or I put them to sleep. There’s definitely good use for these optimized tools. Especially on old systems with low resources and slow CPU’s. I generally like the simplicity of suckless tools. dmenu together with i3 is a nice duo.
  - dhimes 6y ago
    You have working sleep? Man I'm so jealous.
aquabeagle 6y ago
Seems like having to use a bunch of popular patches is counter to the author's other praises about how simple and minimal the software is. Why doesn't upstream integrate them and let everyone use them without having to patch?
- jabl 6y ago
  After everyone upstreams their favourite feature, it'll end up as bloated as the normal (sucky?) software they ostensibly hate.
- bajsejohannes 6y ago
  I'm guessing it's because of their philosophy that more lines of code might be a liability: https://suckless.org/philosophy/ https://suckless.org/philosophy/ Note that you can use dwm just fine without any patches.
- waheoo 6y ago
  Because suckless tools value low line count over most other metrics. The software is generally pretty good though, they cater to a niche. Dont be mad if thats not you. (Its not me either) Luke smith has some pretty good content covering their tools https://youtu.be/unqsQJaECv0 https://youtu.be/unqsQJaECv0
- opan 6y ago
  I see it more as staying modular. Not everyone will want the same patches. This way you build your own version with just what you want.
szemet 6y ago
I like "tabbed". Traditionally I use terminal tabs on local machines, and tmux on remote. (tmux in tmux is just too much tmux for me) After I've changed to alacritty, which does not supports tabs, I could easily recreate my old workflow with "tabbed". (I've never heard of suckless previously, I just knew that I want some generic X11 tabbing SW (and I was sure it must exists somewhere, so have put a lot of effort in googling) - maybe I should check the other things there too...)
AmpsterMan 6y ago
I use some of the suckless suite with minimal configuration and it works well. The configuration isn't all that bad tbh, no worse than the mini-dsls many other non-trivial programs have. I think people should give dmenu a try. It's an application launcher, but it's unix-y design allows for composition in ways that are very interesting.
glangdale 6y ago
I'm not familiar with this "suckless" philosophy, although I've seen it go by a couple times recently. I'm guessing that "suckless" means something different from what I might guess, given half of the article is about how great it is consists of having to debug some serious problem yourself, and the rest of it is self-congratulation over having to recompile everything because "reading configs is hard". To paraphrase Arthur Dent: "Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word 'less' that I wasn't previously aware of."
ArtWomb 6y ago
I'm on CrOS. And I feel like web based tooling is maturing to professional levels. I can give shout outs to: Piskel - for sprite generation, P5JS - texture synth and prototyping, Babylon and Three JS Editors - easy 3D modelling and scene graphs, ShaderToy - vertex and fragment shader development and debugging in webgl, Rayground - ray tracing experimentation, Nodes.io - creative coding, AudioMass - waveform manipulation. Now I wouldn't describe any of these environments as "suckless". At best maybe "experimental". But they are getting better every day ;)
comocomolomo 6y ago
It looks like suckless tools work on X. I recently made the switch to Wayland and was wondering if a similar set of tools (with this minimalist philosophy) exist. Any idea?
- nsajko 6y ago
  No. I'm guessing the main issue is that Wayland is not a replacement for X.
- codr7 6y ago
  Found a Wayland dwm port, still haven't gotten around to trying it out though. https://github.com/djpohly/dwl https://github.com/djpohly/dwl
- __s 6y ago
  I was trying to piece together a nobox successor for Wayland: https://github.com/serprex/noway https://github.com/serprex/noway 250 lines of Rust should get you started wayst in code refers to having gotten https://github.com/michaelforney/st https://github.com/michaelforney/st to work at some point, seems there's also https://github.com/majestrate/wterm https://github.com/majestrate/wterm
factorialboy 6y ago
Back in the day, I used to distro hop, window manager hop and try to find the ever eluding "perfect" setup. This lasted maybe 15 years. There was a sense of vanity in trying to be different yet spectacular. Today I would tell my younger self that use what makes you productive. Even if it is the standard Windows or Mac OS environments. R/unixporn is the nerds equivalent of shirtless beach dudes.
- necrotic_comp 6y ago
  I agree with this. I'd been struggling with using Xmonad et. al. on the desktop for years, figuring that there was something wrong with how I was doing it, hacking on the config to get it just right. Then the pandemic happened, and I had to work from home. So I went to ICEWM, have my terminal with Tmux in the center screen and my web browsers on my left and right monitors and that's good enough for me to be productive and get my job done. So yeah, the perfect setup is not the one that's the coolest, it's the one that lets you get things done efficiently. Unfortunately for me, tiling window managers don't seem to do that.
  - joombaga 6y ago
    > So yeah, the perfect setup is not the one that's the coolest, it's the one that lets you get things done efficiently. My ADD makes these the same. Having a cool desktop setup is the only way I can stay interested enough to get any work done.
  - onli 6y ago
    To be fair, IceWM is pretty cool. No, really. It's the center of my custom linux desktop. You can run a similar setup like described in the article with it, it replaces dwm just fine. Its preferences and winoptions are powerful enough.
    - necrotic_comp 6y ago
      oh! That's good to know. I just plopped it in there because I needed to get work done, and the start menu/desktop metaphor was enough to get me moving. I haven't even changed the defaults.
jbaber 6y ago
I'm exactly the audience for this stuff. I've been using ratpoison as my WM for 15 years. But even it reads a simple config file.
ryanmjacobs 6y ago
I've been using the same dwm config for nearly eight years at this point. Can't beat it :) It's followed me from Arch to Ubuntu to Void
JackFr 6y ago
An erratum is a correction included with an already published work. Errata are multiple corrections. Not sure what “All of these things control various errata.“ means.
progre 6y ago
> cabytcini to show the current time and weather in my dwm bar ... > As of the time of this post being written, it uses only 11 megabytes of ram I'm not a rust programmer. Is 11 megs for an app like this concidered small?
- karatestomp 6y ago
  Wild guess: the web client it includes is most of that. Even if it cleans up the instance of it after, the code itself is still sitting in memory, and that may be quite large. It also seems to include a JSON parser, which might be a bit large. I'd expect something like this grabbing some dead-simple format over a TCP socket, rather than importing a Web library, to be well under a MB, certainly, and even that seems not to be setting a very low bar, to me. Though those are expectations based on C, not Rust.
dannykwells 6y ago
I found this section ironic, since the whole point is the lack of features: " As dwm is configured in C, there’s also a community of people creating patches for dwm that add extra features like additional tiling methods, the ability to automatically start things with dwm, transparency for the statusbar and so much more. I use the following patches..." Eventually, enough users will want a particular patch, and it will be agreed to include for all users. At that time, is the product still suckless?
- __s 6y ago
  Yes
metalliqaz 6y ago
Every time I see these screenshots of tiling window managers like dwm, there is always a browser window smooshed into a block that is barely big enough for a term. I really don't get it. Who uses a web browser like that? I almost always maximize my browser on my desktop, and when i want to share the space with something I'm working on, I maybe will split the screen in half, or just have floating windows on top of each other. Alt+tab works pretty well.
- Carpetsmoker 6y ago
  I rarely use dwm's tiling: I almost always have most things maximized with perhaps one or two floating windows. I use workspaces/tags and alt-tab to switch between stuff. I'm not sure how representative the screenshots are of actual usage.
  - RMPR 6y ago
    >I'm not sure how representative the screenshots are of actual usage. There's a subreddit for that r/UsabilityPorn
- chapium 6y ago
  I've noticed myself doing this with Tmux. I'll occasionally have a terminal that is essentially a thumbnail that I swap into a bigger pane. I think people doing this are making up for a lack of having a visual pager since they went minimalistic.
- yiyus 6y ago
  The way dwm works, you have a main window and you have a stack. It is normal to have windows you are not using in the stack. The small window is indeed not very useful, but it is still more than the icon used in other places.
  - metalliqaz 6y ago
    Windows has a stack too. Most recently used on top. Older windows are either partially or completely covered, but they always have an icon accessible. Would I dedicate a section of my screen to windows down the stack? No, I don't think I would. I guess I just don't get the zen of dwm.
douchescript 6y ago
Nice writeup. I have spent years on dvtm and dwm. Only problem for me is that as i get older i get less interested in bikeshedding my dev setup. I get the same feel from trying to get the right mix of ui programs as trying to manage a javascript frankenstack - just too much work for little gain, and that it breaks over time.
dilandau 6y ago
Suckless is all about hacking your own tools. Totally unsurprising that "hacker" "news" doesn't get it. https://suckless.org/hacking/ https://suckless.org/hacking/
- arkitaip 6y ago
  Most of us have been there, done that since childhood. Once you reach a certain age, it's more important to get things done and not fuss over trivialities in life.
  - HugoDaniel 6y ago
    everything is a triviality if taken sufficiently out of scope
  - codr7 6y ago
    I get what you're saying, and for a long time I managed to convince myself it was true. But. Looking back at my life, the things I got done barely register on the radar compared to the joy of learning and creating, the joy of hacking.
  - clarry 6y ago
    Counter point: as I get older, I find it harder and harder to put up with annoying little nags in the software I use (iow, I have less patience for crap). And boy does software today have a ton of that. I think I'm just about to cross the point where I'll dump the default gnome setup on my work laptop (ubuntu) and install dwm or cwm or whatever. Even with all the tweaking and customization, it doesn't take that long, but it makes work more comfortable every hour, every day, for years to come. It's like ergonomics. When you're a kid, you sit on what you have and you've got more interesting things to worry about than the height of your desk? At some point in life you might just want a nice chair and roomy adjustable desk with a sizeable external monitor on a proper adjustable stand to make work comfortable. That's why you hack your window manager or shell or whatever. The defaults are always terrible and not tailored for you.
geerlingguy 6y ago
This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness, or productivity that I save from just letting someone else choose the defaults for me? I don’t have enough time in my life to debug and recompile my window manager or Terminal app on a regular basis. Maybe a long time ago, when I was single and had a lot more time to burn. But once you get used to an OS and set of tools—warts and all—I think the level of tweaks that are listed in this post are the equivalent of someone spending an hour each day prepping clothing and makeup. For some people, that’s a fun part of their day. For me, it seems like torture.
- booleandilemma 6y ago
  Yeah, the closer I can get to just opening Visual Studio and pressing F5 the happier I am. I like to focus on writing software and shipping a product, not troubleshooting toolchains and figuring out config files for each piece involved. I know not everyone feels this way.
  - xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
    I don't think it's about wanting to focus on troubleshooting toolchains or figuring out config files for each piece involved. I think the issue generally boils down to technical-minded users being empowered to unblock themselves. I use tools like Linux and suckless because I am sick and tired of being blocked by shoddy software failing in an inexplicable, opaque way. If something goes wrong in Windows or Mac OS X, I might be able to file a bug off to into the void, and restart everything, to work around it. There's not much other choice. It's just a waste of time every time it happens. With software I control, whether or not it's a waste of time is up to me.
    - Carpetsmoker 6y ago
      Yeah exactly; I think "how easy is it when everything works?" is just part of the total question of "how easy is it?" Another part is "how easy is it to figure stuff out if it doesn't work?" I think sometimes people forget to ask that second question. This applies to almost all software. There's obviously a trade-off here, and no single right or wrong answer. Visual Studio is undoubtedly neat software with a lot of features that help people being productive; but it's indeed not as simple as the previous post made it out to be, IMHO, as it forgot about the second question. Then again, if you're lucky nothing ever breaks and you win :-) But in my experience people usually aren't that lucky.
noobermin 6y ago
The thing I like about the suckless people and their tools is not breaking what works. Seriously, the primary problem with software today in my assessment is churn. Things change way too fast and you wonder how people get anything done as aging things are constantly being deprecated instead of being considered stabilized. I'm not really a developer (I'm a computational scientist, so I am a different kind of developer), so I'm not sure if this is my place to complain but if I had the time I'd write a whole article about it, I just don't think anyone would care to listen. On the other hand, the thing that I do not like about suckless and the minimal hacker types in general is just the staunch elitism. I think you'll get some level of elitism with any group but in this case, with the minimalism comes a bit of a sense of hostility to new users who just don't think your way. It feels like there is no in between in the foss world, either people seem to be friendly and kind with TOCs and all that but force churn every few years or are militantly minimal and just super unpleasant as people. Then again, I think the thing I want isn't really minimalism, stability to me is the thing that is lacking greatly in the open source world which is sort of a side effect of the minimalism.
- carapace 6y ago
  > Seriously, the primary problem with software today in my assessment is churn. I agree. The machines are wicked fast, most of the needful algorithms are already sussed out, not to mention how ML solves another swath of problems. Today most "programming" should consist of picking and configuring existing software, and this should be seen as a big win and a sign of maturity. (Instead we have Python 3 and Rust and... <rant omitted>) So, yes, we need the outside view, please complain! In re: elitism and hostility, remember that most of the old-school programmers are old enough to have grown up before nerds became cool, so some of that grows out of resentment and alienation.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    Python 3 is a great example of "picking and configuring existing software". If it's not in the standard library, it's on PyPI. A lot of my Python code is just gluing together high-level functionality from various libraries. It's beautiful. You can complain about this or that aspect of language design, but then you also have to look at what a clusterfuck of historical accidents C and C++ are. Like what you like, but at least be correct about why you like what you like (and why you don't like what you don't like).
mark_l_watson 6y ago
The author primarily uses an iPad Pro, a dedicated remote server, and most work done with ssh, tmux, and Emacs. That is a simplified work environment!
- karatestomp 6y ago
  I'm getting ready to move toward something like that, but with VMs for each sort of work or task I'm doing. My reasons: 1) I'm leaving Mac hardware for "pro"-tier computing because their gear's swung way back into ZOMGWTF overpriced territory, especially if you want higher-than-basic-but-still-not-actually-that-much core counts, memory, or disk, while also getting worse in some ways (mostly the MBP line), and not keeping up with what ought to be standard base specs for "premium" hardware. I'll keep buying used Apple gear as terminals and light farting-around machines, and iPads are still the only tablets worth a damn and I use them for tons of stuff, so they've still got me for their iOS devices. 2) No software platforms support suspend/restore-this-entire-desktop-session, with multiple sessions available at once (and the ability to run more than one at once), which is an incredibly productive way of working for me short of having a dedicated machine for every purpose (which would be worse in a lot of ways anyway), so the only way I can get something like that is with a big-assed desktop machine with 4x as much RAM as any one of my tasks/sessions needs, running VMs. I'd rather just be able to suspend and resume user sessions, including desktop and application state, as a native OS feature, as that'd save me the PITA of keeping multiple VMs around and up-to-date and all that—alas, no platform supports that. [EDIT] for the latter, if it's not clear, think "client 1 session", "client 2 session", "side-project 1 session", "side-project 2 session", "gaming session" (probably can't do that one with my set-up as I don't want to screw with gaming in a VM), "book 1 writing/research session", "porn session" (LOL), all isolated and able to suspend/resume from exactly where they were.
  - mark_l_watson 6y ago
    Using mosh instead of ssh, and tmux named sessions I get something like your different sessions.
    - 6y ago
underdeserver 6y ago
11 megabytes of RAM to show the time? What?
wwarner 6y ago
I think the highlight of this story is seeing the open source workflow. She found a bug in the source code of the window manager; she was able to isolate it and make a meaningful report to the community/maintainers; and they fixed it quickly without any blowback. My takeaway from this post is that for open source to work well, it has to be as simple and clear as possible.
baq 6y ago
> I have yet to integrate this meta-patch into my dwm fork, but I’ll probably get around to it someday. famous last words. won't ever use dwm, got no time for this.
ken 6y ago
> Their window manager dwm is just a window manager. It doesn’t handle things like transparency, compositing or volume control. That is a strange division of labor. I thought transparency and composition were aspects of window management. What else would they be?
- p_l 6y ago
  Composition should be domain of display server, IMO (like with Xsgi). Windows DWM.EXE also, AFAIK, keeps to drawing not policy. Transparency support falls under composition - the decision on applying the effect can be left to WM/app. That's how world used to work, but it seems its going the way of dodo :-(
qq11ww22ee33 6y ago
Personally I use my computer like a person and not a programming robot
sxp 6y ago
> For examples of beautiful dwm setups, see this search of /r/unixporn on reddit. Despite its NSFW name, /r/unixporn is a great subreddit of people posting their Linux GUI configs. It's mostly tiling WMs, but I learned a lot about how to heavily customize my setup there. The top posts are worth skimming for anyone who's a fan of beautiful UIs: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/top/?sort=top&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/top/?sort=top&t=all
charlesdaniels 6y ago
I think I agree generally with the thesis of this article. In my view, the value of these types of tools (Suckless & friends) doesn't come from simplicity per se, but more from the fact that they can be debugged at all when they break, because it is possible for one person to have a decent handle on all the pieces and how they fit together. I have tried to use and like more complex environments like macOS or GNOME in the past. If they actually worked, they would be great. However, something inevitably breaks, and now I have to unpick a twisted not of dependencies, IPC, libraries, languages, etc. At least when CWM breaks, it can be fixed at all rather than being forced to give up and deal with it being broken. I think people saying "having to hack on the C sources isn't easy" and the counterpoint "it's just a four kLOC of C, it's easy to hack on!" are both right, but also missing the point. GNOME, KDE, etc. are so complicated, that from the perspective of an individual person trying to fix a problem, they may as well be closed source unless you're willing to devote months just to learning the project. I have no problem using complicated tools, as long as they are tools that I understand, because I can't fix things I don't understand. Alternatively, complex tools that work so well that they never break are also fine, since I never have to fix them.
mnm1 6y ago
Seems pretty sucky to me to have to debug your window manager or configure a half dozen apps just to do basic things like changing the sound volume or showing the time. If I didn't know any better, I'd think this was a parody. It's the complete opposite of what I'd call suckless tools. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy doing those things sometimes in my time off and playing with systems, but when I need to get work done, I want a system that requires as few changes as possible from the default and whose basic functionality I don't ever need to debug. OS X used to be this and I'm still using it despite the latest version, even on a brand new mbpro, being unstable. Some Linux distros are close but even in 2020, still require constant debugging of the core system (display drivers, DE bugs, stability, etc.). Windows looks promising but due to it being adware, I never got around to testing it properly.
- chapium 6y ago
  Its just a name, and an interesting project.
smitty1e 6y ago
The suckless.org lists a couple of unmaintained distros under their rocks/ section. However https://sta.li/ https://sta.li/ (static linux, not "stalin"[:-1] ) appears to be in circulation.

238 points by martinhath 6y ago

hhmc 6y ago

> If something goes wrong while using them, you can easily jump right into the code that implements them and nail down issues using basic debugger skills. I feel like we have very different conceptions of what 'easily' fixing a configuration issue looks like.

tarruda 6y ago
From the implementation POV, suckless software is very simple, and this makes it easier not only to tweak configuration (which is usually done C headers through defines), but also any kind of customization you might need. Take their window manager dwm as an example. The codebase is only 2000 lines long, so any bug you find will have to be hidden in those 2000 lines. If you take a Sunday afternoon to study the code, you will very likely understand how every piece of the software works, at which point you will be in a position to fix anything you might find. You might even end up forking it and implementing your own window manager (AwesomeWM was originally forked from Dwm).
- ryanmjacobs 6y ago
  This comment strikes home. The "bug-space" is so much smaller, and definitely possible for a lone newcomer to grasp in a day or two
  - ken 6y ago
    A window manager may be only 2000 lines of source code but it implements a host of formal and informal standards and interacts with hundreds of other programs on my computer. You may need only a day or two to orient yourself to the source code, but that’s on top of months or years of experience with X11R6 and ICCCMv2 and EWMH and such. How much debugging did you first need to do to discover your current issue was even in dwm? EDIT: I especially love the phrasing in Wikipedia's ICCCM article: dwm "can be configured for compliance". If 'configuration' can include editing source code, I'm sure that's true!
    - ryanmjacobs 6y ago
      I agree to an extent. I'll admit, there is much more under the surface of dwm that 2000 lines of source code. It's all abstractions in the end. But Gnome and KDE are more likely to have bugs because they cover such a wide scope. I've never had dwm fail to do what it claimed to do. But I have had weird Gnome glitches with taskbar hovering and window dragging with workspaces, etc. Dwm "wins" by just giving up, in a sense. It doesn't try to implement a taskbar, therefore it cannot have a buggy taskbar. EDIT: I guess it does have a "Taskbar", but in a very, very limited scope.
      - RMPR 6y ago
        iirc Dwm doesn't have a "taskbar", at least by default, there's a patch for that.
        ryanmjacobs 6y ago
        Yeah, I guess a better word is "statusbar" or "workspace bar". It just displays the currently selected workspaces, the current window's title, and dwmstatus. The point is that it doesn't try to manage buttons and icons for minimize/maximize/multiple-stacked window types etc, like a traditional window manager
- ilitirit 6y ago
  > If you take a Sunday afternoon to study the code, you will very likely understand how every piece of the software works, at which point you will be in a position to fix anything you might find. You might even end up forking it and implementing your own window manager (AwesomeWM was originally forked from Dwm). I don't think I have ever needed to do this "fix" any piece of configuration in any software. While I understand the concept and approach, I don't think that this is a productive use of most people's time.
  - noobermin 6y ago
    Be a little charitable to OP and this reply. The configuration is indeed in code but it's macro defines. It's essentially as simple as changing a text configuration file, it's not like you have to actually edit code (as in new functions, adding actual logic). Things like fonts and sizes and colors is changing defines, it's actually simple. Now when it comes to more complex stuff, like hotkeys, well you're essentially programming already in most other wms that doesn't have such things build in. AwesomeWM, i3, qtile (not popular but I used it for years) basically is half-way to programming, although it's a line, so it isn't any worse. I think the thing people aren't getting is the code is actually simple, so editing it and recompiling it isn't a chore.
    - ilitirit 6y ago
      I actually am quite familiar with suckless tools and I do consider myself an advanced user, so I'm probably part of their target market as well. But to be honest, from a pragmatic point of view I just don't see how configuration through code is better/worse than configuration through dot/json/ini files in the average "suckless" use-case. Why must this even be something that I care about? If it's a case of their software being simpler to understand so which makes it easier to fix bugs, then sure, I get that. But in my experience, software that has been around forever just tends to have fewer bugs in general so it's also just something else that I simply don't need to care about. And how often does the average user of suckless tools actually have to fix bugs in the programs? If it's more than once, then does the label "suck less" even qualify? Is it just because the software is extremely minimal and therefore less "bloated"? I get that too, but personally, why would I care if a piece of software is 70kb or 500kb in this age? YMMV. Don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to bash suckless or any other community here. I'm just very pragmatic about the tools that I use and my workflow. If you're the type of person that likes to tinker and customize every aspect from the ground up, sure then maybe suckless tools are for you. Tinker and mod away, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that.

sseneca 6y ago

I used st for a while but switched to kitty. kitty obviously has way more features (things like colour switching can be added to st, but requires messing with patches which I dislike, and dislike more than compiling on each configuration change). I've been using kitty for a few months now and performance is great. in fact, the biggest performance gain I saw was when I switched away from "oh my zsh" to a manually written `~/.zshrc`.

tdy_err 6y ago
Don't tell anybody where you placed your .zshrc- it's supposed to be a secret!
knubie 6y ago
On top of that, kitty’s window management / split pane features are way more performant than tmux’s, which contradicts one of the early points in the article about st.

jdub 6y ago

As much as possible, I try to use software created by kind communities. The behaviours and attitudes in the "suckless" world come across as combative, exclusive, and unpleasant.

kamranjon 6y ago
In what way are they combative or unpleasant? I've never experienced this. I enjoy the philosophy and opinionated approach they have to development. I setup an old thinkpad with openbsd and dwm and st and it all worked great and i learned some C along the way. I also used sent - their plaintext slide presentation tool to give a talk at work and it was a pretty cool way to put a presentation together quickly and focus on ideas. Anyway - I like their software and the opnionatedness makes it kinda fun to explore.
- jdub 6y ago
  Start with the name. That puts it in opposition immediately. They present a lot of that opposition to projects and people, rarely stated kindly. They could express a positive enthusiasm for simplicity, but that's not the way they go about it.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    >Start with the name. That puts it in opposition immediately The name that immediately claims that their software sucks? I get where you are coming from, but you're just labeling the average software with a different term.
    - Certhas 6y ago
      It very very clearly implies that other software sucks and theirs sucks less. If there would be any ambiguity in this they explicitly bash genetic "other hackers" all throughout their philosophy page. It's not exactly subtle.
      - 6y ago

Havoc 6y ago

This caters to a very specific audience though. This particular concept while labelled suckless sounds like hell to me. To change a config I need to recompile stuff? Jikes To each their own though. I can see how this could work well if one invested a mountain of time into learning & fine-tuning it all

tutfbhuf 6y ago
> suckless tools having their configuration baked into the executable at compile time, they start up instantly I wonder how many milliseconds slower the startup of a C application will be, when it reads a config file from SSD first.
- eeZah7Ux 6y ago
  Milliseconds? Probably less than one.
- rejschaap 6y ago
  Yeah, reading a single file will not have a noticable impact, but we all know it will not stop at a single file. Before you know it a full blown web browser is included. The suckless philosophy is pretty extreme, but I'm grateful there are people exploring this space.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    Yea people seem to be quite critical of this when its not like they have to use it. Do people act this way if you do LFS?
  - mikepurvis 6y ago
    I think that's the key thing. It's not about config, it's the fact that the "plugins" are all compiled in as well— meanwhile over here in the real world we have there are entire programs and methodologies dedicated to managing directories of vimscript files, and sharing your personal dotfiles directory on github is a thing.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Macha 6y ago

I get that people enjoy very minimalist computer experiences, but startup time is hardly that different between these programs and other slightly more ergonomic programs which offer conveniences like a config file. If you look at my startup time for my system it goes something like this: 10s - waiting for monitor to wake up to pick OS at dual boot menu 15s - typing disk encryption password 15s - system uses disk encryption password to retrieve LUKS key 5s - Literally the entirety of my OS and window manager and autostart programs beginning. I use i3 for my window manager, which manages to launch instantly, and alt-enter launches alacritty for my terminal, which also launches instantly. But even heavier terminals like xfce4-terminal launch very quickly. These programs are lightweight sure, but they don't need to be recompiled for configuration and have some ergonomics. I don't see the marginal benefit of maybe 4s at boot time being worth that hassle.

tutfbhuf 6y ago
I completely agree. Suckless tools shouldn't be pedantic about C code minimalism. As per my definition, suckless tools are lightweight, KISS and offer some simple ergonomics. I find it nice to be able to scroll the terminal up, when I'm not inside of tmux.
tarkin2 6y ago
The main thing I loved about suckless and missed on OS X was DWM. Dealing with windows, even with the tiling aspects, hammerspoon to automate things, and playing around with configs to turn off all the animation, on OS X I was still much more productive using DWM.
xiwenc 6y ago
Stronger yet I rarely reboot my systems. Either they run 24/7 or I put them to sleep. There’s definitely good use for these optimized tools. Especially on old systems with low resources and slow CPU’s. I generally like the simplicity of suckless tools. dmenu together with i3 is a nice duo.
- dhimes 6y ago
  You have working sleep? Man I'm so jealous.

aquabeagle 6y ago

Seems like having to use a bunch of popular patches is counter to the author's other praises about how simple and minimal the software is. Why doesn't upstream integrate them and let everyone use them without having to patch?

jabl 6y ago
After everyone upstreams their favourite feature, it'll end up as bloated as the normal (sucky?) software they ostensibly hate.
bajsejohannes 6y ago
I'm guessing it's because of their philosophy that more lines of code might be a liability: https://suckless.org/philosophy/ https://suckless.org/philosophy/ Note that you can use dwm just fine without any patches.
waheoo 6y ago
Because suckless tools value low line count over most other metrics. The software is generally pretty good though, they cater to a niche. Dont be mad if thats not you. (Its not me either) Luke smith has some pretty good content covering their tools https://youtu.be/unqsQJaECv0 https://youtu.be/unqsQJaECv0
opan 6y ago
I see it more as staying modular. Not everyone will want the same patches. This way you build your own version with just what you want.

szemet 6y ago

I like "tabbed". Traditionally I use terminal tabs on local machines, and tmux on remote. (tmux in tmux is just too much tmux for me) After I've changed to alacritty, which does not supports tabs, I could easily recreate my old workflow with "tabbed". (I've never heard of suckless previously, I just knew that I want some generic X11 tabbing SW (and I was sure it must exists somewhere, so have put a lot of effort in googling) - maybe I should check the other things there too...)

AmpsterMan 6y ago

I use some of the suckless suite with minimal configuration and it works well. The configuration isn't all that bad tbh, no worse than the mini-dsls many other non-trivial programs have. I think people should give dmenu a try. It's an application launcher, but it's unix-y design allows for composition in ways that are very interesting.

glangdale 6y ago

I'm not familiar with this "suckless" philosophy, although I've seen it go by a couple times recently. I'm guessing that "suckless" means something different from what I might guess, given half of the article is about how great it is consists of having to debug some serious problem yourself, and the rest of it is self-congratulation over having to recompile everything because "reading configs is hard". To paraphrase Arthur Dent: "Ah, this is obviously some strange use of the word 'less' that I wasn't previously aware of."

ArtWomb 6y ago

I'm on CrOS. And I feel like web based tooling is maturing to professional levels. I can give shout outs to: Piskel - for sprite generation, P5JS - texture synth and prototyping, Babylon and Three JS Editors - easy 3D modelling and scene graphs, ShaderToy - vertex and fragment shader development and debugging in webgl, Rayground - ray tracing experimentation, Nodes.io - creative coding, AudioMass - waveform manipulation. Now I wouldn't describe any of these environments as "suckless". At best maybe "experimental". But they are getting better every day ;)

comocomolomo 6y ago

It looks like suckless tools work on X. I recently made the switch to Wayland and was wondering if a similar set of tools (with this minimalist philosophy) exist. Any idea?

nsajko 6y ago
No. I'm guessing the main issue is that Wayland is not a replacement for X.
codr7 6y ago
Found a Wayland dwm port, still haven't gotten around to trying it out though. https://github.com/djpohly/dwl https://github.com/djpohly/dwl
__s 6y ago
I was trying to piece together a nobox successor for Wayland: https://github.com/serprex/noway https://github.com/serprex/noway 250 lines of Rust should get you started wayst in code refers to having gotten https://github.com/michaelforney/st https://github.com/michaelforney/st to work at some point, seems there's also https://github.com/majestrate/wterm https://github.com/majestrate/wterm

factorialboy 6y ago

Back in the day, I used to distro hop, window manager hop and try to find the ever eluding "perfect" setup. This lasted maybe 15 years. There was a sense of vanity in trying to be different yet spectacular. Today I would tell my younger self that use what makes you productive. Even if it is the standard Windows or Mac OS environments. R/unixporn is the nerds equivalent of shirtless beach dudes.

necrotic_comp 6y ago
I agree with this. I'd been struggling with using Xmonad et. al. on the desktop for years, figuring that there was something wrong with how I was doing it, hacking on the config to get it just right. Then the pandemic happened, and I had to work from home. So I went to ICEWM, have my terminal with Tmux in the center screen and my web browsers on my left and right monitors and that's good enough for me to be productive and get my job done. So yeah, the perfect setup is not the one that's the coolest, it's the one that lets you get things done efficiently. Unfortunately for me, tiling window managers don't seem to do that.
- joombaga 6y ago
  > So yeah, the perfect setup is not the one that's the coolest, it's the one that lets you get things done efficiently. My ADD makes these the same. Having a cool desktop setup is the only way I can stay interested enough to get any work done.
- onli 6y ago
  To be fair, IceWM is pretty cool. No, really. It's the center of my custom linux desktop. You can run a similar setup like described in the article with it, it replaces dwm just fine. Its preferences and winoptions are powerful enough.
  - necrotic_comp 6y ago
    oh! That's good to know. I just plopped it in there because I needed to get work done, and the start menu/desktop metaphor was enough to get me moving. I haven't even changed the defaults.

jbaber 6y ago

I'm exactly the audience for this stuff. I've been using ratpoison as my WM for 15 years. But even it reads a simple config file.

ryanmjacobs 6y ago

I've been using the same dwm config for nearly eight years at this point. Can't beat it :) It's followed me from Arch to Ubuntu to Void

JackFr 6y ago

An erratum is a correction included with an already published work. Errata are multiple corrections. Not sure what “All of these things control various errata.“ means.

progre 6y ago

> cabytcini to show the current time and weather in my dwm bar ... > As of the time of this post being written, it uses only 11 megabytes of ram I'm not a rust programmer. Is 11 megs for an app like this concidered small?

karatestomp 6y ago
Wild guess: the web client it includes is most of that. Even if it cleans up the instance of it after, the code itself is still sitting in memory, and that may be quite large. It also seems to include a JSON parser, which might be a bit large. I'd expect something like this grabbing some dead-simple format over a TCP socket, rather than importing a Web library, to be well under a MB, certainly, and even that seems not to be setting a very low bar, to me. Though those are expectations based on C, not Rust.

dannykwells 6y ago

I found this section ironic, since the whole point is the lack of features: " As dwm is configured in C, there’s also a community of people creating patches for dwm that add extra features like additional tiling methods, the ability to automatically start things with dwm, transparency for the statusbar and so much more. I use the following patches..." Eventually, enough users will want a particular patch, and it will be agreed to include for all users. At that time, is the product still suckless?

__s 6y ago
Yes

metalliqaz 6y ago

Every time I see these screenshots of tiling window managers like dwm, there is always a browser window smooshed into a block that is barely big enough for a term. I really don't get it. Who uses a web browser like that? I almost always maximize my browser on my desktop, and when i want to share the space with something I'm working on, I maybe will split the screen in half, or just have floating windows on top of each other. Alt+tab works pretty well.

Carpetsmoker 6y ago
I rarely use dwm's tiling: I almost always have most things maximized with perhaps one or two floating windows. I use workspaces/tags and alt-tab to switch between stuff. I'm not sure how representative the screenshots are of actual usage.
- RMPR 6y ago
  >I'm not sure how representative the screenshots are of actual usage. There's a subreddit for that r/UsabilityPorn
chapium 6y ago
I've noticed myself doing this with Tmux. I'll occasionally have a terminal that is essentially a thumbnail that I swap into a bigger pane. I think people doing this are making up for a lack of having a visual pager since they went minimalistic.
yiyus 6y ago
The way dwm works, you have a main window and you have a stack. It is normal to have windows you are not using in the stack. The small window is indeed not very useful, but it is still more than the icon used in other places.
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  Windows has a stack too. Most recently used on top. Older windows are either partially or completely covered, but they always have an icon accessible. Would I dedicate a section of my screen to windows down the stack? No, I don't think I would. I guess I just don't get the zen of dwm.

douchescript 6y ago

Nice writeup. I have spent years on dvtm and dwm. Only problem for me is that as i get older i get less interested in bikeshedding my dev setup. I get the same feel from trying to get the right mix of ui programs as trying to manage a javascript frankenstack - just too much work for little gain, and that it breaks over time.

dilandau 6y ago

Suckless is all about hacking your own tools. Totally unsurprising that "hacker" "news" doesn't get it. https://suckless.org/hacking/ https://suckless.org/hacking/

arkitaip 6y ago
Most of us have been there, done that since childhood. Once you reach a certain age, it's more important to get things done and not fuss over trivialities in life.
- HugoDaniel 6y ago
  everything is a triviality if taken sufficiently out of scope
- codr7 6y ago
  I get what you're saying, and for a long time I managed to convince myself it was true. But. Looking back at my life, the things I got done barely register on the radar compared to the joy of learning and creating, the joy of hacking.
- clarry 6y ago
  Counter point: as I get older, I find it harder and harder to put up with annoying little nags in the software I use (iow, I have less patience for crap). And boy does software today have a ton of that. I think I'm just about to cross the point where I'll dump the default gnome setup on my work laptop (ubuntu) and install dwm or cwm or whatever. Even with all the tweaking and customization, it doesn't take that long, but it makes work more comfortable every hour, every day, for years to come. It's like ergonomics. When you're a kid, you sit on what you have and you've got more interesting things to worry about than the height of your desk? At some point in life you might just want a nice chair and roomy adjustable desk with a sizeable external monitor on a proper adjustable stand to make work comfortable. That's why you hack your window manager or shell or whatever. The defaults are always terrible and not tailored for you.

geerlingguy 6y ago

This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness, or productivity that I save from just letting someone else choose the defaults for me? I don’t have enough time in my life to debug and recompile my window manager or Terminal app on a regular basis. Maybe a long time ago, when I was single and had a lot more time to burn. But once you get used to an OS and set of tools—warts and all—I think the level of tweaks that are listed in this post are the equivalent of someone spending an hour each day prepping clothing and makeup. For some people, that’s a fun part of their day. For me, it seems like torture.

booleandilemma 6y ago
Yeah, the closer I can get to just opening Visual Studio and pressing F5 the happier I am. I like to focus on writing software and shipping a product, not troubleshooting toolchains and figuring out config files for each piece involved. I know not everyone feels this way.
- xyzzy_plugh 6y ago
  I don't think it's about wanting to focus on troubleshooting toolchains or figuring out config files for each piece involved. I think the issue generally boils down to technical-minded users being empowered to unblock themselves. I use tools like Linux and suckless because I am sick and tired of being blocked by shoddy software failing in an inexplicable, opaque way. If something goes wrong in Windows or Mac OS X, I might be able to file a bug off to into the void, and restart everything, to work around it. There's not much other choice. It's just a waste of time every time it happens. With software I control, whether or not it's a waste of time is up to me.
  - Carpetsmoker 6y ago
    Yeah exactly; I think "how easy is it when everything works?" is just part of the total question of "how easy is it?" Another part is "how easy is it to figure stuff out if it doesn't work?" I think sometimes people forget to ask that second question. This applies to almost all software. There's obviously a trade-off here, and no single right or wrong answer. Visual Studio is undoubtedly neat software with a lot of features that help people being productive; but it's indeed not as simple as the previous post made it out to be, IMHO, as it forgot about the second question. Then again, if you're lucky nothing ever breaks and you win :-) But in my experience people usually aren't that lucky.

noobermin 6y ago

The thing I like about the suckless people and their tools is not breaking what works. Seriously, the primary problem with software today in my assessment is churn. Things change way too fast and you wonder how people get anything done as aging things are constantly being deprecated instead of being considered stabilized. I'm not really a developer (I'm a computational scientist, so I am a different kind of developer), so I'm not sure if this is my place to complain but if I had the time I'd write a whole article about it, I just don't think anyone would care to listen. On the other hand, the thing that I do not like about suckless and the minimal hacker types in general is just the staunch elitism. I think you'll get some level of elitism with any group but in this case, with the minimalism comes a bit of a sense of hostility to new users who just don't think your way. It feels like there is no in between in the foss world, either people seem to be friendly and kind with TOCs and all that but force churn every few years or are militantly minimal and just super unpleasant as people. Then again, I think the thing I want isn't really minimalism, stability to me is the thing that is lacking greatly in the open source world which is sort of a side effect of the minimalism.

carapace 6y ago
> Seriously, the primary problem with software today in my assessment is churn. I agree. The machines are wicked fast, most of the needful algorithms are already sussed out, not to mention how ML solves another swath of problems. Today most "programming" should consist of picking and configuring existing software, and this should be seen as a big win and a sign of maturity. (Instead we have Python 3 and Rust and... <rant omitted>) So, yes, we need the outside view, please complain! In re: elitism and hostility, remember that most of the old-school programmers are old enough to have grown up before nerds became cool, so some of that grows out of resentment and alienation.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  Python 3 is a great example of "picking and configuring existing software". If it's not in the standard library, it's on PyPI. A lot of my Python code is just gluing together high-level functionality from various libraries. It's beautiful. You can complain about this or that aspect of language design, but then you also have to look at what a clusterfuck of historical accidents C and C++ are. Like what you like, but at least be correct about why you like what you like (and why you don't like what you don't like).

mark_l_watson 6y ago

The author primarily uses an iPad Pro, a dedicated remote server, and most work done with ssh, tmux, and Emacs. That is a simplified work environment!

karatestomp 6y ago
I'm getting ready to move toward something like that, but with VMs for each sort of work or task I'm doing. My reasons: 1) I'm leaving Mac hardware for "pro"-tier computing because their gear's swung way back into ZOMGWTF overpriced territory, especially if you want higher-than-basic-but-still-not-actually-that-much core counts, memory, or disk, while also getting worse in some ways (mostly the MBP line), and not keeping up with what ought to be standard base specs for "premium" hardware. I'll keep buying used Apple gear as terminals and light farting-around machines, and iPads are still the only tablets worth a damn and I use them for tons of stuff, so they've still got me for their iOS devices. 2) No software platforms support suspend/restore-this-entire-desktop-session, with multiple sessions available at once (and the ability to run more than one at once), which is an incredibly productive way of working for me short of having a dedicated machine for every purpose (which would be worse in a lot of ways anyway), so the only way I can get something like that is with a big-assed desktop machine with 4x as much RAM as any one of my tasks/sessions needs, running VMs. I'd rather just be able to suspend and resume user sessions, including desktop and application state, as a native OS feature, as that'd save me the PITA of keeping multiple VMs around and up-to-date and all that—alas, no platform supports that. [EDIT] for the latter, if it's not clear, think "client 1 session", "client 2 session", "side-project 1 session", "side-project 2 session", "gaming session" (probably can't do that one with my set-up as I don't want to screw with gaming in a VM), "book 1 writing/research session", "porn session" (LOL), all isolated and able to suspend/resume from exactly where they were.
- mark_l_watson 6y ago
  Using mosh instead of ssh, and tmux named sessions I get something like your different sessions.
  - 6y ago

underdeserver 6y ago

11 megabytes of RAM to show the time? What?

wwarner 6y ago

I think the highlight of this story is seeing the open source workflow. She found a bug in the source code of the window manager; she was able to isolate it and make a meaningful report to the community/maintainers; and they fixed it quickly without any blowback. My takeaway from this post is that for open source to work well, it has to be as simple and clear as possible.

baq 6y ago

> I have yet to integrate this meta-patch into my dwm fork, but I’ll probably get around to it someday. famous last words. won't ever use dwm, got no time for this.

ken 6y ago

> Their window manager dwm is just a window manager. It doesn’t handle things like transparency, compositing or volume control. That is a strange division of labor. I thought transparency and composition were aspects of window management. What else would they be?

p_l 6y ago
Composition should be domain of display server, IMO (like with Xsgi). Windows DWM.EXE also, AFAIK, keeps to drawing not policy. Transparency support falls under composition - the decision on applying the effect can be left to WM/app. That's how world used to work, but it seems its going the way of dodo :-(

qq11ww22ee33 6y ago

Personally I use my computer like a person and not a programming robot

sxp 6y ago

> For examples of beautiful dwm setups, see this search of /r/unixporn on reddit. Despite its NSFW name, /r/unixporn is a great subreddit of people posting their Linux GUI configs. It's mostly tiling WMs, but I learned a lot about how to heavily customize my setup there. The top posts are worth skimming for anyone who's a fan of beautiful UIs: https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/top/?sort=top&t=all https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/top/?sort=top&t=all

charlesdaniels 6y ago

I think I agree generally with the thesis of this article. In my view, the value of these types of tools (Suckless & friends) doesn't come from simplicity per se, but more from the fact that they can be debugged at all when they break, because it is possible for one person to have a decent handle on all the pieces and how they fit together. I have tried to use and like more complex environments like macOS or GNOME in the past. If they actually worked, they would be great. However, something inevitably breaks, and now I have to unpick a twisted not of dependencies, IPC, libraries, languages, etc. At least when CWM breaks, it can be fixed at all rather than being forced to give up and deal with it being broken. I think people saying "having to hack on the C sources isn't easy" and the counterpoint "it's just a four kLOC of C, it's easy to hack on!" are both right, but also missing the point. GNOME, KDE, etc. are so complicated, that from the perspective of an individual person trying to fix a problem, they may as well be closed source unless you're willing to devote months just to learning the project. I have no problem using complicated tools, as long as they are tools that I understand, because I can't fix things I don't understand. Alternatively, complex tools that work so well that they never break are also fine, since I never have to fix them.

mnm1 6y ago

Seems pretty sucky to me to have to debug your window manager or configure a half dozen apps just to do basic things like changing the sound volume or showing the time. If I didn't know any better, I'd think this was a parody. It's the complete opposite of what I'd call suckless tools. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy doing those things sometimes in my time off and playing with systems, but when I need to get work done, I want a system that requires as few changes as possible from the default and whose basic functionality I don't ever need to debug. OS X used to be this and I'm still using it despite the latest version, even on a brand new mbpro, being unstable. Some Linux distros are close but even in 2020, still require constant debugging of the core system (display drivers, DE bugs, stability, etc.). Windows looks promising but due to it being adware, I never got around to testing it properly.

chapium 6y ago
Its just a name, and an interesting project.

smitty1e 6y ago

The suckless.org lists a couple of unmaintained distros under their rocks/ section. However https://sta.li/ https://sta.li/ (static linux, not "stalin"[:-1] ) appears to be in circulation.