Suckless Software is Terrible -- Unless You Work For It

After months of going suckless, Matt shares his thoughts on the Suckless philosophy. Basically, Suckless is a myth because you have to do so much work to get the programs actually usable.

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[burtonsumner]

As a computer science major, I gotta say, I love suckless's software. When I wanna code in my own version of a patch, it really challenges me to solely go off context clues when analyzing the code, breaking it down practically line by line in some instances. Their short variable names and sparse documentation comments makes me really have to work for it. And when I finally sleuth out what specific functions I need to edit in order to implement particular feature I wanna add, it makes my work feel a lot more meaningful and rewarding. That and i feel like it would be a great way to gain some experience working with actual professional projects, even if just by tweaking my own fork.

[shifter]

I've gone through a similar experience as you. I've patched dwm up to ~5 patches and got the look and feel how I want. At some point I realized that my combination of patches was basically default xmonad but it wasn't worth switching because I had invested so much time into dwm. Pretty soon after that dwm was updated which basically meant I would have to either patch everything again onto the new version, or run an old version of dwm. That was when I realized that patches are not sustainable long term. I switched to xmonad for a while but always preferred dwm. After getting tired of xmonad, I decided to try patchless dwm. It actually works very well and I've realized that a lot of the patches I had were going against the grain of how the software should be used. I don't miss any of the patches or layouts and am happy that I can easily keep dwm up to date now. I've had 0 patches for about a year now and don't see myself using another window manager any time soon!

[jacobwerner]

one thing ive noticed with suckless is the documents assume you already know what your doing. no real information on stuff like statically linking programs in sbase/ubase or anything on actually using sinit.

[Awwe]

How to zoom in zoom out
How to change terminal colors
If I close my terminal or chrome its still stuck in my screen? Sorry for my English language 😑 please help I love dwm

[Robertass]

dwm built in status bar has great asiatic fonts recognition. I had an issue with xmobar or polybar being less capable to recognize/display various fonts.

[phonewithoutquestion]

I recently took the Suckless Pill and got my pants set on fire trying to set it up the "easy way" with preconfigured setups. I am now avoiding the patch command, manually editing the code via Geany due to my clumsy tendencies. It's fun learning how to pick apart code, break it then fix it, and cheat your way around it.

[georgichalakov]

Dwm comes missing lots of things but the beauty of it is that you can make it contain only the functions you need and none of the bloat that comes with other tiling wm

[LinuxEnjoyer]

Imo Suckless tools are more of work of art than "real" tools. The dev wants to show us just how small a program can be. You can use it as a "real" tools, but not that's not the main purpose.

Btw your channel is very underrated. You deserve more subs

[hiroaritillwhen]

I spend few days just making suckless software work and I think its good for learning purposes.

[nevoyu]

I have 7 patches on dwm after looking at other window managers dwm's config is really the only one I can wrap my head around as a C developer (which kinda makes sense I guess).
I looked at xmonad, awesome and even i3 but I kinda just prefer dwm's simplicity and honestly it's not that bad to manually patch.
dwm is really the only suckless tool I use besides slock (which I don't modify at all) and slstatus (since it works better than calling bash scripts in my experience).

[armynyus]

2:30: "You can't change that hotkey w/o patching it" - at this point I stopped watching.

Their mission statement, as I would put it, is:

- For our software we do NOT draw that artificial line between what WE, the authors, think should be configurable and what not
- We rather write our software in a super clean, small and modular way, so that developers can easily understand and adapt it to whatever they need - incl. using the declarative possibilities of the programming language itself (config.h)
- Since we not offer a declarative config file layer on top of our software (and thus saving us the effort of parsing, validating, documenting the config file within our software) but offer just one entry, the software itself, patching is the only mechanics to change it - no matter if config.h or the C code.


This is their claim to fame, their reason to exist, like it or not. I do. If you do not like it, then why even review?

[victorhugo-woci]

I too think suckless stuff is terrible but i cant stop using it