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Why I Use Suckless Tools

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Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#111

Post by ognarb »

blauditore wrote: post #77
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.

My problem is that I was pretty productive with Ubuntu + Unity, significantly more than with Windows or MacOS, or other Linux DEs. This was great because Unity was the default DE for one of the most common Linux distros, so it was well-supported and easy to find information about tweaks and settings online. But then it got killed off due to a vocal minority constantly complaining about it, and now I'm trying to find…

Disclaimer: KDE dev

Did you try Plasma? You can drag a window while holding the Win key, there are tons of keyboard navigation, and your last point can be achieved by this extension: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-hud. There is even some global themes with the look of Unity.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#112

Post by onli »

necrotic_comp wrote: post #87
onli wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, IceWM is pretty cool. No, really. It's the center of my custom linux desktop. You can run a similar setup like described in the article with it, it replaces dwm just fine. Its preferences and winoptions are powerful enough.

oh! That's good to know. I just plopped it in there because I needed to get work done, and the start menu/desktop metaphor was enough to get me moving. I haven't even changed the defaults.

I think my very first FOSS project was a config program for icewm, written in bash and with xdialog. https://sourceforge.net/projects/ice-prefer/. Horrible code of course (edit: Looking at it - not as horrible as I expected). But they might even still work, though I didn't use them in ages. ice-prefer for the settings, ice-win for the winoptions. Turns out that once my desktop was configured I didn't have much need for them. That was of course way before the current icewm fork that has a preferences menu in the start menu.

The winoptions I still recommend looking into, especially pinning apps to one workspace is very useful. That's not too far into the "configure everything" category. The concept of ice-win (clicking on a window, then having all options visible and configurable) would still be useful for that.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#113

Post by chapium »

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've noticed myself doing this with Tmux. I'll occasionally have a terminal that is essentially a thumbnail that I swap into a bigger pane. I think people doing this are making up for a lack of having a visual pager since they went minimalistic.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#114

Post by faizmokhtar »

blauditore wrote: post #77
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.

My problem is that I was pretty productive with Ubuntu + Unity, significantly more than with Windows or MacOS, or other Linux DEs. This was great because Unity was the default DE for one of the most common Linux distros, so it was well-supported and easy to find information about tweaks and settings online. But then it got killed off due to a vocal minority constantly complaining about it, and now I'm trying to find…

For macOS, I've been using [Hammerspoon][1] to solve the extensive keyboard navigation and resizing windows. Try checking it out. You may find it interesting.

[1]:https://www.hammerspoon.org/

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#115

Post by arp242 »

xyzzy_plugh wrote: post #90
booleandilemma wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the closer I can get to just opening Visual Studio and pressing F5 the happier I am. I like to focus on writing software and shipping a product, not troubleshooting toolchains and figuring out config files for each piece involved. I know not everyone feels this way.

I don't think it's about wanting to focus on troubleshooting toolchains or figuring out config files for each piece involved. I think the issue generally boils down to technical-minded users being empowered to unblock themselves. I use tools like Linux and suckless because I am sick and tired of being blocked by shoddy software failing in an inexplicable, opaque way. If something goes wrong in Windows or Mac OS X, I…

Yeah exactly; I think "how easy is it when everything works?" is just part of the total question of "how easy is it?" Another part is "how easy is it to figure stuff out if it doesn't work?" I think sometimes people forget to ask that second question. This applies to almost all software.

There's obviously a trade-off here, and no single right or wrong answer. Visual Studio is undoubtedly neat software with a lot of features that help people being productive; but it's indeed not as simple as the previous post made it out to be, IMHO, as it forgot about the second question.

Then again, if you're lucky nothing ever breaks and you win :-) But in my experience people usually aren't that lucky.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#117

Post by saithound »

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…

Another anecdata point:

I had the same experience with dwm, and this is the reason I keep using it.

I spent a day to set my system up a couple of years ago, and never had to touch it again. There are no dependencies, so it does not break on updates. It has so few moving parts that nothing ever goes wrong. It gets out of my way so that I can get the job done.

Moreover, I can sleep sound, not worrying about how they'll replace the toolbar with a start screen in dwm 8.0, only to change it back in dwm 8.1 after I spent the better part of the year relearning my workflow instead of doing my job.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#118

Post by wwarner »

I think the highlight of this story is seeing the open source workflow. She found a bug in the source code of the window manager; she was able to isolate it and make a meaningful report to the community/maintainers; and they fixed it quickly without any blowback. My takeaway from this post is that for open source to work well, it has to be as simple and clear as possible.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#119

Post by baq »

> I have yet to integrate this meta-patch into my dwm fork, but I’ll probably get around to it someday.

famous last words. won't ever use dwm, got no time for this.

Re: Why I Use Suckless Tools

#120

Post by Avamander »

ognarb wrote: post #111
blauditore wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My problem is that I was pretty productive with Ubuntu + Unity, significantly more than with Windows or MacOS, or other Linux DEs. This was great because Unity was the default DE for one of the most common Linux distros, so it was well-supported and easy to find information about tweaks and settings online. But then it got killed off due to a vocal minority constantly complaining about it, and now I'm trying to find…

Disclaimer: KDE dev Did you try Plasma? You can drag a window while holding the Win key, there are tons of keyboard navigation, and your last point can be achieved by this extension: https://github.com/Zren/plasma-hud . There is even some global themes with the look of Unity.

I'm not the person you replied to, but yes, KDE seems to be the closest equivalent. However I still miss a nicely working global menu.
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