4 ms·
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 hones
by 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.
- karatestomp 6y ago> I get that too, but personally, why would I care if a piece of software is 70kb or 500kb in this age? YMMV. I'm torn on this because I am way, way over screwing around with my OS, but I also hate that all the modern standard desktop operating systems (macOS, Win10, Gnome3 or KDE) that you get if you don't want to jack with defaults and configure things or use some way-less-popular so likely to be (even more) janky distro or "spin" or whatever, want to take up a gigabyte or more (way more for macOS and Win10 especially, tens of GB) of disk and hundreds of MB of RAM, while delivering experiences that are marginally better than what we had in the late 90s and early 2000s with sub-GB OS installations and low-tens of MB of memory use when idle.
- nerdponx 6y agoAll the more reason to not get worked up over including something as mundane as a TOML parser in your dependencies for a config file. So that, you know, you don't have to recompile your WM whenever you want to adjust something.