I don't see why you're focusing on speed (does the author even mention it? I skimmed TFA and didn't find it mentioned). Less bloat, simpler code means fewer bug

I don't see why you're focusing on speed (does the author even mention it? I skimmed TFA and didn't find it mentioned). Less bloat, simpler code means fewer bugs and it means that it's easy for a hacker/power user to dig into the code to understand and modify it, that's the killer feature. After one hour poking into DWM I understood how it worked and how I could modify it to fit my needs exactly. I use a bunch of suckless tools, in particular DMW. I don't necessarily agree with all their choices but for me it's about configurability and reliability. I consider myself a power user, I know how things work, I don't need a gui to configure my keyboard or network interface. I don't want daemons running in the background and overwriting the settings I apply manually with the command line (a common issue I have with more fully fledged "desktop environments"). Ergonomics easily win too, sure I have to mess with C code to get the config I want, but then it's basically tailor-made vs. ready-made. All the functions I use the most are one key keystroke away, I use the mouse so little that I often find myself searching for it because it ended up buried underneath some papers. I want to focus the terminal? Win-C. I want to focus Vim? Win-E. Firefox? Win-w. I have special customization to sticky windows the way I like, placement rules etc... Everything is fast, reliable, no pointless transitions, no cruft, no having to worry about the next update changing a behaviour that I use and me having to figure out how to revert the change or relearn how I do things. >I don't see the marginal benefit of maybe 4s at boot time being worth that hassle. Before I used DWM I used StumpWM for more than a decade, an other tiling WM. Being written in Common Lisp it was quite slow to boot up from an image dump (especially 10+ years ago on HDDs and vastly less powerful CPUs). For me performance is highly irrelevant, the "hassle" is what I'm in it for. It's like learning to touchtype, at first it's immensely frustrating but once you're past the learning curve it gets really beneficial. Digging throw DWM's code is harder than clicking on Gnome's menus, but once you've got it working exactly like you want you probably won't have to touch it for a long while. The last significant change I made to my DWM fork dates from July 27 2018. Since then I've only tweaked a couple of keybindings.