Sometimes, I have had to change software (although not from suckless, since I do not use any of their software) by modifying and recompiling it, to do what I wa

Sometimes, I have had to change software (although not from suckless, since I do not use any of their software) by modifying and recompiling it, to do what I wanted. > There's nothing simple or "unbloated" about having to recompile a piece of software every time you want to make what should really be a runtime user configuration, and it makes an entire compiler toolchain effectively a dependency for even the most trivial config change. It is true, but depending on the software, sometimes this is acceptable. (Some of the internet server software that I wrote (such as scorpiond) are configured in this way, in order to take advantage of compiler optimizations.) For some other programs, some things will have to be configured at compile time (mostly things that probably don't need to be changed after making a package of this program in some package manager), although most things can be configured at run time and do not need to be onfigured at compile time. > I tried their window manager out once and the only way to add some functionality through plugins is to apply source code patches, but there's no guarantee that the order doesn't mess things up, so you basically end up manually stitching pieces of code together for functionality that is virtually unrelated. It's actual madness from a complexity standpoint. This is a valid criticism, and is why I don't do that for my own software. However, it is sometimes useful to make your own modifications to existing programs, but just applying sets of patches that do not necessarily match is the madness that you describe.