Why I Use Suckless Tools
christine.website
Why I Use Suckless Tools
1–10 of 215 posts
Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools
#2This 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
Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools
#3[deleted]
Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools
#4I 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.
Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools
#5Seems 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?
Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools
#6This 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
> 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.
Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools
#7I 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 encr…
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.
Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools
#8I 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...)
Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools
#9I 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.
Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools
#10This 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
> 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.
Milliseconds? Probably less than one.