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Why I Use Suckless Tools

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Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#91

Post by amelius »

arp242 wrote: post #79
geerlingguy wrote: post #66

This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness,…

> I don’t have enough time in my life to debug and recompile my window manager or Terminal app on a regular basis. Maybe a long time ago, when I was single and had a lot more time to burn. I set up dwm, st, and dmenu once years ago, and have worked flawlessly without faults ever since. I actually use a stripped-down hacked-up dwm that I did on a Sunday years ago and have since lost the source for it; I can't recompil…

> I actually use a stripped-down hacked-up dwm that I did on a Sunday years ago

Aha, so in some sense the software was still not totally suckless to you.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#92

Post by MauranKilom »

allis10 wrote: post #59
jdub wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Start with the name. That puts it in opposition immediately. They present a lot of that opposition to projects and people, rarely stated kindly. They could express a positive enthusiasm for simplicity, but that's not the way they go about it.

Accusations of "elitism" being what they may, the name is in fact a slice of humility: they advertise that their software "sucks less", not that it is "without suck".

That's not the way I understand the "-less" composition they use. "harmless" doesn't mean "poses less harm", it means "poses no harm". "colorless" doesn't mean "less color", it means "no color". And so on. So to me, "suckless" means "doesn't suck", no humility. Admittedly, it doesn't exactly follow the normal composition rules so the exact interpretation is more up in the air, but that won't change the fact that many people will read it the way I described above.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#93

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

factorialboy wrote: post #34

Back in the day, I used to distro hop, window manager hop and try to find the ever eluding "perfect" setup. This lasted maybe 15 years. There was a sense of vanity in trying to be different yet spectacular. Today I would tell my younger self that use what makes you productive. Even if it is the standard Windows or Mac OS environments. R/unixporn is the nerds equivalent of shirtless beach dudes.

why not just version with git in a dotfiles directory that can be provisioned with 2-3 commands? automating this is really no overhead. (unless you change your color scheme every 2 days?).

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#94

Post by Carpetsmoker »

metalliqaz wrote: post #60

Every time I see these screenshots of tiling window managers like dwm, there is always a browser window smooshed into a block that is barely big enough for a term. I really don't get it. Who uses a web browser like that? I almost always maximize my browser on my desktop, and when i want to share the space with something I'm working on, I maybe will split the screen in half, or just have floating windows on top of eac…

I rarely use dwm's tiling: I almost always have most things maximized with perhaps one or two floating windows. I use workspaces/tags and alt-tab to switch between stuff.

I'm not sure how representative the screenshots are of actual usage.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#95

Post by jonfw »

geerlingguy wrote: post #66

This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness,…

There is a really really wide gap between sticking with default settings and using suckless tools.

I use a lot of tools that I significantly customize- i3wm, tmux, vim, fish, fzf, etc. I'm certainly no stranger to editing and maintaining configs, but when I've tried the suckless tools in the past they turn everything right up to 11.

My strategy, and this is the same as a few other people I've seen comment here, is to choose a tool that has sane defaults, and only customize to eliminate pain points. If it requires significant configuration just to get it viable, than it's not going to work for me.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#96

Post by HugoDaniel »

arkitaip wrote: post #80
dilandau wrote: post #65

Suckless is all about hacking your own tools. Totally unsurprising that "hacker" "news" doesn't get it. https://suckless.org/hacking/

Most of us have been there, done that since childhood. Once you reach a certain age, it's more important to get things done and not fuss over trivialities in life.

everything is a triviality if taken sufficiently out of scope

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#97

Post by zserge »

amelius wrote: post #91
arp242 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t have enough time in my life to debug and recompile my window manager or Terminal app on a regular basis. Maybe a long time ago, when I was single and had a lot more time to burn. I set up dwm, st, and dmenu once years ago, and have worked flawlessly without faults ever since. I actually use a stripped-down hacked-up dwm that I did on a Sunday years ago and have since lost the source for it; I can't recompil…

> I actually use a stripped-down hacked-up dwm that I did on a Sunday years ago Aha, so in some sense the software was still not totally suckless to you.

As per their own definition, "suckless" != "does not suck", but rather "software that sucks less".

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#98

Post by codr7 »

arkitaip wrote: post #80
dilandau wrote: post #65

Suckless is all about hacking your own tools. Totally unsurprising that "hacker" "news" doesn't get it. https://suckless.org/hacking/

Most of us have been there, done that since childhood. Once you reach a certain age, it's more important to get things done and not fuss over trivialities in life.

I get what you're saying, and for a long time I managed to convince myself it was true.

But.

Looking back at my life, the things I got done barely register on the radar compared to the joy of learning and creating, the joy of hacking.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#99

Post by __s »

amelius wrote: post #91
arp242 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t have enough time in my life to debug and recompile my window manager or Terminal app on a regular basis. Maybe a long time ago, when I was single and had a lot more time to burn. I set up dwm, st, and dmenu once years ago, and have worked flawlessly without faults ever since. I actually use a stripped-down hacked-up dwm that I did on a Sunday years ago and have since lost the source for it; I can't recompil…

> I actually use a stripped-down hacked-up dwm that I did on a Sunday years ago Aha, so in some sense the software was still not totally suckless to you.

I also used a more minimalist self made WM based on reading dwm's source: https://github.com/serprex/nobox

The "I don't want to spend time configuring my desktop environment" argument misses the point with these things. Everyone had to learn how to use various interfaces. It's easiest for me to learn something whose code I can mess around with

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#100

Post by sneak »

geerlingguy wrote: post #66

This post highlights many of the reasons why I’ve chosen to just stick with a standard, widely-used desktop OS (macOS in my case, but could easily be Windows or some other OS like Fedora), and use almost all the default settings, adapting to the defaults over the years. Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness,…

> Would the tiny incremental gain from tweaking one or two specific settings to my perfect liking save me anywhere near the amount of time, happiness, or productivity that I save from just letting someone else choose the defaults for me?

There are substantial privacy and security benefits to leaving the macOS/Windows ecosystem. Both of these operating systems include a lot of telemetry that is non-trivial to disable, and both use opaque, proprietary encryption software with a history of catastrophic bugs, including for disk encryption.

The big one though is spyware: Windows makes no farce of it, and is instrumented up the wazoo. You've got to dig into the registry to disable a lot of it, and firewall the rest. Opting out during install is entirely insufficient.

macOS used to be a lot better, but as of Catalina, even with all of the Apple network services disabled, iCloud turned off, Siri and location turned off, analytics opted out, no Facetime, no iMessage, no App Store, et c et c, it still sends all sorts of traffic to Apple, including some to no-hostname 17./8 IPs for some reason.

To get basic privacy on these systems, you have to do hours of work after install, run third party firewalls, and even then you're who-knows-how-many disk encryption 0days away from a stolen laptop meaning total compromise of your data.

This is not to say there aren't any encryption 0days in linux, but there are certainly a lot more eyeballs on the source, for a much longer time.

Conversely, linux doesn't really have anything comparable to Little Snitch or the per-app per-directory permissions of Catalina, sadly.

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