3 ms·

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 m

by imiric 4y ago

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.

juliangoldsmith 4y ago
The tools can be hit-or-miss, but where was dwm crashing? I've used it for over a decade with few issues. Your issues were probably with a patch or combination of patches. Out of curiosity, what features were you missing? The point of dwm is to make it easy to write your own features (though the "easy" part might be a bit questionable at times).
- imiric 4y ago
  It's been a few years since I tried it, so I don't recall the details, sorry. I did use some patches, so that could've been it. That's the thing with suckless tools; most of them are barely usable without any patches. And the patches are distributed on their site, with no guarantees whether they'll apply cleanly, or have conflicts with other patches. Your best bet is to take over maintenance yourself, or use someone else's fork. I do appreciate the barebones philosophy, but I just don't want to maintain my own window manager and web browser. The tools are only usable if you don't need much functionality, and only apply a few patches. What would be convenient is if these optional patches were part of the main repository, and kept up-to-date with the main branch, and I could easily select which ones I want to build with, get conflict warnings, etc. This wouldn't stray too much from their philosophy, but would give a much better UX. It would add some burden on the core team, and improving UX isn't really their goal, so I'm clear this will never happen. I'll just keep using other tools that do prioritize this.
  - Beltalowda 4y ago
    > That's the thing with suckless tools; most of them are barely usable without any patches It depends on your preferences I guess; I run the standard st with just the colours and font configured, I have my own hacked-up "private fork" of dwm that removes a lot of stuff (and adds/changes a few minor things), and run dmenu with just one patch ("prefix completion" patch).
dsr_ 4y ago
I've been using X11-based terminal emulators for 30 years now, and I can't recall ever having the temrinal emulator itself crash.
- imiric 4y ago
  Good for you. I've experienced them plenty with urxvt[1], and now occasionally with st. I'm pretty sure the st crash is due to a patch, but I've just been lazy to fix it. It's rare and not disruptive enough, so it's tolerable. [1]: Enough to make me stop using urxvtd, which took down all my client terminals with it...
  - neilv 4y ago
    Are you running Linux and Xorg, or something else? Have you ruled out flaky RAM? Reason I ask: I don't recall ever having urxvt crash, in many years of use, and counting. Nor recall a crash in earlier decades of use of other versions of rxvt and xterm. I'd expect them to crash, but they haven't.
    - imiric 4y ago
      Yes, Linux and Xorg. I doubt it's flaky RAM, as this happened on at least 2 machines. I've been using my current daily driver since 2018, and haven't experienced crashes with most other tools I use.
    - hn92726819 4y ago
      They might be conflating urxvt with urxvtd. I have had urxvtd crash before and have never used it again. Urxvt has never crashed in the 5 years I've used it
      - imiric 4y ago
        No, I've definitely had both crash. I kept using just urxvt so that I only lose one terminal window, but eventually found st to be much more stable, and better overall.
matheusmoreira 4y ago
> st is my favorite terminal The source code is very approachable too. It's the simplest terminal program I could find. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to see how it works or make their own.
leephillips 4y ago
Bizarre. I've been using dwm for years, on a variety of computers, all day every day, and it hasn’t crashed one time.
- imiric 4y ago
  The thing is that your dwm likely wasn't my dwm. I don't remember which patches I applied, or if I introduced a bug that made it crash. I gave it a try from scratch several times, possibly with different patches each time, and always reached instability issues. Maybe it's a sign that suckless tools aren't for everyone, and I'm certainly not an experienced C programmer, but that's the effect of asking your users to also be maintainers of the software.

by imiric 4y ago

juliangoldsmith 4y ago

The tools can be hit-or-miss, but where was dwm crashing? I've used it for over a decade with few issues. Your issues were probably with a patch or combination of patches. Out of curiosity, what features were you missing? The point of dwm is to make it easy to write your own features (though the "easy" part might be a bit questionable at times).

imiric 4y ago
It's been a few years since I tried it, so I don't recall the details, sorry. I did use some patches, so that could've been it. That's the thing with suckless tools; most of them are barely usable without any patches. And the patches are distributed on their site, with no guarantees whether they'll apply cleanly, or have conflicts with other patches. Your best bet is to take over maintenance yourself, or use someone else's fork. I do appreciate the barebones philosophy, but I just don't want to maintain my own window manager and web browser. The tools are only usable if you don't need much functionality, and only apply a few patches. What would be convenient is if these optional patches were part of the main repository, and kept up-to-date with the main branch, and I could easily select which ones I want to build with, get conflict warnings, etc. This wouldn't stray too much from their philosophy, but would give a much better UX. It would add some burden on the core team, and improving UX isn't really their goal, so I'm clear this will never happen. I'll just keep using other tools that do prioritize this.
- Beltalowda 4y ago
  > That's the thing with suckless tools; most of them are barely usable without any patches It depends on your preferences I guess; I run the standard st with just the colours and font configured, I have my own hacked-up "private fork" of dwm that removes a lot of stuff (and adds/changes a few minor things), and run dmenu with just one patch ("prefix completion" patch).

dsr_ 4y ago

I've been using X11-based terminal emulators for 30 years now, and I can't recall ever having the temrinal emulator itself crash.

imiric 4y ago
Good for you. I've experienced them plenty with urxvt[1], and now occasionally with st. I'm pretty sure the st crash is due to a patch, but I've just been lazy to fix it. It's rare and not disruptive enough, so it's tolerable. [1]: Enough to make me stop using urxvtd, which took down all my client terminals with it...
- neilv 4y ago
  Are you running Linux and Xorg, or something else? Have you ruled out flaky RAM? Reason I ask: I don't recall ever having urxvt crash, in many years of use, and counting. Nor recall a crash in earlier decades of use of other versions of rxvt and xterm. I'd expect them to crash, but they haven't.
  - imiric 4y ago
    Yes, Linux and Xorg. I doubt it's flaky RAM, as this happened on at least 2 machines. I've been using my current daily driver since 2018, and haven't experienced crashes with most other tools I use.
  - hn92726819 4y ago
    They might be conflating urxvt with urxvtd. I have had urxvtd crash before and have never used it again. Urxvt has never crashed in the 5 years I've used it
    - imiric 4y ago
      No, I've definitely had both crash. I kept using just urxvt so that I only lose one terminal window, but eventually found st to be much more stable, and better overall.

matheusmoreira 4y ago

> st is my favorite terminal The source code is very approachable too. It's the simplest terminal program I could find. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to see how it works or make their own.

leephillips 4y ago

Bizarre. I've been using dwm for years, on a variety of computers, all day every day, and it hasn’t crashed one time.

imiric 4y ago
The thing is that your dwm likely wasn't my dwm. I don't remember which patches I applied, or if I introduced a bug that made it crash. I gave it a try from scratch several times, possibly with different patches each time, and always reached instability issues. Maybe it's a sign that suckless tools aren't for everyone, and I'm certainly not an experienced C programmer, but that's the effect of asking your users to also be maintainers of the software.