I love the suckless philosophy, but their tools are very hit and miss.
st is my favorite terminal, and I use it daily. It crashes from time to time, but it's manageable.
I used surf as my main browser for a few years, until it refused to compile with the latest WebKitGTK a couple of years ago. I switched to Luakit, and have been mostly happy with the transition.
dwm was unusable for me the few times I tried it. It would crash constantly, and it just doesn't have the features of other lightweight WMs, even with all the patches. I settled on bspwm many years ago, and it's been rock solid.
rofi is better than dmenu. sxlock is better than slock.
I think OP will hit many roadblocks with this all-in suckless approach. There are better tools out there that are similarly lightweight, but with much better UX. You can save yourself many headaches by being pragmatic, and using the right tool for the job.
Good for you. I've experienced them plenty with urxvt[1], and now occasionally with st. I'm pretty sure the st crash is due to a patch, but I've just been lazy to fix it. It's rare and not disruptive enough, so it's tolerable.
[1]: Enough to make me stop using urxvtd, which took down all my client terminals with it...
Are you running Linux and Xorg, or something else? Have you ruled out flaky RAM?
Reason I ask: I don't recall ever having urxvt crash, in many years of use, and counting. Nor recall a crash in earlier decades of use of other versions of rxvt and xterm. I'd expect them to crash, but they haven't.
They might be conflating urxvt with urxvtd. I have had urxvtd crash before and have never used it again. Urxvt has never crashed in the 5 years I've used it
No, I've definitely had both crash. I kept using just urxvt so that I only lose one terminal window, but eventually found st to be much more stable, and better overall.
Interesting. You might want to enable core dumps, and the next time you get a crash of a program, load it up in `gdb` and at least get a stack trace. That probably won't give instant blame among a C program and libraries, but it might at least point in the right direction for why it's crashing.
Yes, Linux and Xorg. I doubt it's flaky RAM, as this happened on at least 2 machines. I've been using my current daily driver since 2018, and haven't experienced crashes with most other tools I use.
The tools can be hit-or-miss, but where was dwm crashing? I've used it for over a decade with few issues. Your issues were probably with a patch or combination of patches.
Out of curiosity, what features were you missing? The point of dwm is to make it easy to write your own features (though the "easy" part might be a bit questionable at times).
It's been a few years since I tried it, so I don't recall the details, sorry. I did use some patches, so that could've been it.
That's the thing with suckless tools; most of them are barely usable without any patches. And the patches are distributed on their site, with no guarantees whether they'll apply cleanly, or have conflicts with other patches. Your best bet is to take over maintenance yourself, or use someone else's fork.
I do appreciate the barebones philosophy, but I just don't want to maintain my own window manager and web browser. The tools are only usable if you don't need much functionality, and only apply a few patches.
What would be convenient is if these optional patches were part of the main repository, and kept up-to-date with the main branch, and I could easily select which ones I want to build with, get conflict warnings, etc. This wouldn't stray too much from their philosophy, but would give a much better UX. It would add some burden on the core team, and improving UX isn't really their goal, so I'm clear this will never happen. I'll just keep using other tools that do prioritize this.
> That's the thing with suckless tools; most of them are barely usable without any patches
It depends on your preferences I guess; I run the standard st with just the colours and font configured, I have my own hacked-up "private fork" of dwm that removes a lot of stuff (and adds/changes a few minor things), and run dmenu with just one patch ("prefix completion" patch).
The source code is very approachable too. It's the simplest terminal program I could find. Highly recommended for anyone who wants to see how it works or make their own.
The thing is that your dwm likely wasn't my dwm. I don't remember which patches I applied, or if I introduced a bug that made it crash. I gave it a try from scratch several times, possibly with different patches each time, and always reached instability issues.
Maybe it's a sign that suckless tools aren't for everyone, and I'm certainly not an experienced C programmer, but that's the effect of asking your users to also be maintainers of the software.
>>Software with a focus on simplicity, clarity, and frugality.
>The developers also pride themselves on catering to advanced and experienced computer users,
But, no. It's a drumbeat of less code and fewer features. Which is only simple in a specific worse is better sense and frequently infrugal because efficiency would require more code.
Advanced and experienced computer users are not catered to, not catering to anyone who might need a feature is their whole schtick.
Less code, with fewer features iff combined with well written code is often better than more featureful code for advanced users as it is a better place to start modifying the code into what you need. So instead of a generic tool with tons of features, a simple tool that is simple to modify. Advanced tools have their place as well (eg. ffmpeg). IMO each has it's pros and cons but I wouldn't say one is necessarily superior to the other.
Can't we have both? If the code is modifiable/scriptable enough, we could get more feature, speed, reliability, than with huge codebases. I don't know if it is one of their goals tho.
> The developers also pride themselves on catering to advanced and experienced computer users, which is actually a refreshing take in my opinion
Am I too old?
My first linux install took me days to get to the point of showing a desktop. Not catering to advanced users is the novelty in the linux world imo - and it’s not entirely there yet.
The entire industry is obsessed with onboarding and first-experience ease and intuitive interfaces and making things "just work", etc, etc. This includes Linux, which still has rough edges but the approach of just making things simple instead of easy and aiming at advanced users is very rare these days.
Not necessarily. The traditional windows model worked because everything has a keyboard shortcut. If you're doing some mildly repetitive task it's a simple step to learn the short cuts.
Increasingly though software is becoming 'easier' to use by removing things like shortcuts etc. Moving a mouse in the same way 100 times increases the mental burden over using whatever shortcut.
My first (arch btw) linux install it took me a whole week to install correctly in the first place, yet to show the DE. This was with prior experience working with linux. I personally liked that it was complicated since it was a good learning experience (much better than the oversimplified Ubuntu install anyways)
Arch makes things complicated by not having defaults. Leaving the user to pick a network management tool, partitioning scheme, many other things. It's all very well documented and aimed at understanding one's system. I give them that. But in some ways it seems to be intentionally complex for the sake of it. And the one thing I did want to change: systemd, is the one thing you can't. It took me 2 days to get a desktop running and I still ran into weird stuff.
On the contrary, FreeBSD also dumps you on a command line. But it does have defaults for most things and it took me only a few hours you set up because everything is guided better with the defaults in mind.
I really like the idea of a stable base OS with rolling software also, and the ports collection (which is quite similar to the AUR). But there's more ways to do manual and arch's isn't necessarily the best IMO.
If you like having a "complicated" install, why not install Debian manually using debootstrap? It's pretty much the same thing, but it leaves you with a much better supported system afterwards.
Debian has versioned releases and thoroughly patched, extremely old software. Arch Linux has rolling releases and mostly unpatched up to date software.
While I agree with the basic idea, it seems that in practice it's been taken over by ascetes who throw the baby out with the bath water and impose pointless restrictions on themselves just for signalling.
If you want software to have less complexity, you don't choose a language which gives you options, you choose one which removes ways to make mistakes. That means, emphatically, not C. You don't have to choose Rust, which is complex indeed, but allows your code to be less difficult. If you want strictness, choose Haskell. Or maybe go the middle way and do OCaml. Or maybe Ada.
I don't understand how the suckless community goes from "vulnerabilities are commonplace" and calling out masterminds to writing C, which is famously difficult to code without stepping into undefined behaviour.
Or maybe I do: this checks out if minimalism is more important than vulnerabilities and simplicity.
Similar criticism can be applied to sticking to X11 compared to Wayland, regarding vulnerabilities (any application can see any other) and performance (any application can block the entire server - try ssh -X on a high latency connection to see).
Suckless.org programs are simple enough that RIIR ought to be an actually viable strategy. Why not just try it yourself, if you're that concerned about safety?
Suckless can work well if you do things alone and uniquely within text, but when it is time to collaborate in three-dimensional space, you'll find yourself hiding your cringe "Suckless" desktop like a dirty little secret on TTY2. Because who wants to be that guy in the office? Imagine swiveling around to a bewildered colleague, who just watched you struggle to zoom in, scroll down or resize a window. Imagine having to explain to them what they're looking at.
Suckless also leads to wild misconceptions about your ability. It has the minimalist and snappy aesthetic of a hacker wunderkind's monitor, even though you're secretly doing equivalent work to everyone else within this setup, often at a reduced rate due to compatibility issues with the rest of your department. So what then? People start saying things like, "Oh, that Mike really knows what he's doing. Have you seen how bonkers his screen looks?" That's a lot to live up to.
Here's an interesting experiment: Pick a random Suckless fanboy on YouTube. Skim through one of their videos. Then skim through another video from 9 months before. Notice how everything about their work-setup constantly changes. These guys never learn to let things lie, never learn about the power of habits and the unique human ability to adapt to almost any interface, rather than forcing their immediate surroundings into a narrow stencil. Flow with it.
I think you're missing the point of why most people choose suckless and similar tools.
Those missing features you mention _is_ the appeal. If, and when, they need a specific feature, they'll add it by making another minimal change to their setup, or try to avoid it altogether by reusing an existing tool.
The fact these tools are snappy and outperform most larger tools is also an appeal. I'm sure that same person you mention can do things in a fraction of the time it takes someone using standard tools.
Sometimes this can be seen as a compromise by others, but it's not due to some radical stubbornness, or a desire to do things differently. They just prefer not using off-the-shelf tools, and conforming to how someone else—or even worse, a committee—decided they should use computers.
It's like people who prefer minimalism in their everyday life, or those who DIY everything rather than buying pre-built products, or those who choose to live off-grid. Sure, there is an aspect of struggle, but it's something that comes with that way of life, and it's a welcomed part of the experience.
This is why suckless is more of a philosophy than just a collection of software. It's not meant for everyone, and it will never be mainstream.
I actually do use suckless tools, so I don't think I missed these points. I've read them many times over the years in fact. I've used i3 (which is quite suckless) and dmenu for a good while, mostly out of habit at this stage, and I've basically come to the conclusion that I mistakenly looked up the to the wrong people many years ago, and mistook confidently spoken dogma for wisdom. Snappiness and "outperformance" in the suckless world are usually defined via memory footprint, which is basically just metric Gerrymandering. You pay for that unremarkable performance edge by severely degrading your personal performance on teams, on other people's machines and in movie night situations when you're the only person who can control your esoteric computer.
I bought into the whole "do the minimal changes when they arise" thing for many years, but then I realised I was basically just slowly rediscovering what had already been discovered by plenty of others before me: the bundled desktops work fine, and they are not really the problem. The problem for me was actually just a need to feel in control while other things in life felt out of my control. That's probably why I still haven't kicked all suckless stuff entirely. But I would never advise anybody else to go down the suckless path. There are so many better hobbies to explore out there, incidentally so many hobbies that will put you in circles that are more enjoyable company than the suckless circles. Slowly iterating on your own personal set of keybindings and scripty doodads is the digital equivalent of spending an evening playing single player solitaire, except much less challenging.
I agree that suckless has a presentation problem in the workplace and the small things being hard are often working against you.
I don't agree that you should spend time configuring and suckless makes configuration hard on purpose. I think the suckless philosophy embrasses vi over the embarrassing plugin/configuration hellscape of vim.
> Snappiness and "outperformance" in the suckless world are usually defined via memory footprint
That's one aspect of it, but I think it's not the driving factor on today's hardware. It's mostly about your computer doing what you want it to do, exactly when you want to do it. If I have to wait for some superfluous animation to load, or deal with several layers of menus to get to what I need, that works against my productivity.
Take dmenu, rofi or sxhkd, for example. I can make them run any command or shell script to do exactly what I want, and it can be triggered in milliseconds via the keyboard. Whereas the typical desktop user would probably place a desktop or taskbar icon, have to navigate with their mouse to launch it, deal with animations, etc. Power users would likely use a keyboard shortcut or their OS' search feature or keyboard launcher, but that assumes that what they want to accomplish is even available in their ecosystem.
This level of customization and adapting your OS to your workflow, rather than the other way around, is just incomparable to pre-built DEs. I'm not sure how you can claim this results in a "reduced rate due to compatibility issues", when efficiency and productivity are the whole point of this setup.
> You pay for that unremarkable performance edge [...] in movie night situations when you're the only person who can control your esoteric computer.
This is where I think there's a disconnect with what you want vs. what these tools offer. While I use some suckless and similar tools on my work machine, I still use KDE and even Windows on other machines when my goal isn't to be productive. My work machine is for my personal use, and I don't expect anyone else to use it. I'm perfectly fine with using other environments for other purposes, just don't expect me to be productive in them.
> There are so many better hobbies to explore out there, incidentally so many hobbies that will put you in circles that are more enjoyable company than the suckless circles. Slowly iterating on your own personal set of keybindings and scripty doodads is the digital equivalent of spending an evening playing single player solitaire, except much less challenging.
I think you're still missing the point of the purpose of these tools, and coming off rather patronizing. This is not some hobby, or about being in "enjoyable company"... Would you say the same thing to someone who chooses to live off-grid? It's much easier to depend on urban power and water infrastructure, than trying to meet your needs independently. People who choose to live this way would tell you it works great for them, and also wouldn't approve of the urban lifestyle. That's not to say that either is objectively right or wrong, but it boils down to personal preference.
> Notice how everything about their work-setup constantly changes. These guys never learn to let things lie, never learn about the power of habits and the unique human ability to adapt to almost any interface, rather than forcing their immediate surroundings into a narrow stencil. Flow with it.
It could also be that their circumstances changed and they adapted their setup accordingly? A good non-opinionated workflow does that. I really hated the way I could not customise macOS' desktop to my preferences (and that they kept changing their preferences on me) so I moved to KDE which has a lot more choice. Now I change settings regularly as I need.
For the programs I most frequently launch from my desktop, I have hotkey sequences that do a switch-to-this-program-window-or-start-the-program-if-not-running. For the remaining programs, `dmenu`.
(I've tried using i3wm for a year, and tweaking my config of it, but going back to xmonad is always a relief. The one thing I like better about i3 was that I got the autohide system tray working how I liked it, which was better than I've done with xmonad.)
Well, for one thing, tiling WMs having "no config" and instead just being configured in the implementation language, is pretty much the standard. See StumpWM, Awesome, xmonad, etc.
Dwm is written in C. A tradeoff of that is having to recompile it. But it also has upsides like resource efficiency and speed.
I don't daily drive it and never did, but dwm has been a godsend back when I did embed, for implementing a highly restricted work flow easily for embed applications.
I think of it more as a template for quickly throwing together a custom WM from scratch, when resources are at a premium.
>Well, for one thing, tiling WMs having "no config" and instead just being configured in the implementation language, is pretty much the standard. See StumpWM, i3/Sway, xmonad, etc.
i3 and sway are written in C but have plain text config files.
You're right of course, my bad. I think for some reason my brain transposed i3/sway with awesome, which is configured in its implementation language. Will correct my comment, thanks.
In other window managers, you still use a plain text file written in a formal language to configure them, and it's usually a worse language, that you have to learn just for the purpose of configuring your wm.
In dwm, you don't need to learn an additional, inferior language. You simply use C.
> To change anything you must recompile and relaunch.
When I used to run DWM this wasn't an issue at all, recompiled and relaunched nearly instantaneously. Easily scripted as well, not a problem to get editors to automatically recompile and send the restart signal if you needed to.
The performance benefits are negligible. It's mostly just to make the code easier (don't need to parse anything, don't need to deal with filesystem access, etc.) Also makes it easier to hack on dwm.
It's been a while since I've looked into it, but most minimal WMs that I've tried fall over completely on high DPI displays from a lack of a global zoom setting.
Maybe my eyes are just getting bad (I'm ~30) but the lack of that accessibility it makes them unusable for me.
I use dwm (the suckless tiling window manager, certainly “minimal”) on a variety of high DPI screens, and there’s no problem. Just set Xft.dpi in your .Xresources file to the “real” screen DPI or to anything you want to scale as you wish.
Suckless comes up every so often and then it goes on to politics about the Suckless people.
I really like the idea of Suckless, I wish the people involved with it directly addresses what to me seems to be a disturbing political slant at their conferences.
Of course, you can ignore that an just use the software. Or better yet look for other similar software created by people that are apolitical.
OpenBSD seems to be a place that does its best to be minimal, and their network setup to me is far better then anything else in Linux or the other BSDs.
Is it really irrelevant? ReiserFS withered when its namesake dev was jailed for murdering his wife. Perhaps he had good ideas but nobody wants to touch it with a 10 foot pole now. Who wants to support a murderer?
I also moved away from a major mobile OS since its main dev started a crusade about a competing project. I'll leave the details vague not to get into the discussion. But it gave me an uneasy feeling. Is this the guy I want to maintain critical code on my device?
I'm not aware of the suckless people but the idea that the personal lives of the devs don't matter is not something completely irrelevant IMO.
> ReiserFS withered when its namesake dev was jailed for murdering his wife.
That is unimportant for the purpose of considering whether or not ReiserFS is any good.
Looking on Wikipedia, I can already find one problem though, which is the year 2038 problem. Wikipedia also says "Some directory operations (including unlink(2)) are not synchronous on ReiserFS, which can result in data corruption with applications relying heavily on file-based locksif the machine halts before it has synchronized the disk."
So, there are a few problems with ReiserFS (although it might have good ideas too). But if the author murdered his wife, that is the problem with the author, not a problem with ReiserFS. (It is still a problem, but it is a problem with something else.)
When you use a product, you're supporting the owner, and the brand. In IT it's not as widely used but clothing brands sell their brand more than they sell a product. A lot of brands aren't that great quality but people wear them proudly as a form of expression. Even regardless of the fact that they're made by little kids in a sweatshop half a world away. People judge us by the products we choose. It's a human thing. Pretending this phenomenon doesn't exist doesn't make it go away.
It can also clarify what to expect from the authors in the future and what direction they will go into with their product. In that sense it's more of a practical continuity-type of thing. In the case of Reiser, it's kinda hard to lead a thriving product when one is in jail for life.
Again I don't know what the deal is with suckless and their people (in fact if Poettering doesn't like them that's a plus for them in my book ;) ), but I don't see the people behind it and the product as two separate things.
I'm pretty ignorant beyond they're software devs who write stuff I like. I understand if you don't want to bring up their politics here and potentially ruin this thread too, but if it can be done tastefully I'd be curious about their politics.
> They named a mail server "Wolf's Lair." Only they're German so this was in German.
A single developer associated with suckles has a private machine with the "wolfsschanze" hostname. This is a big difference with "suckless has a mail server named wolfsschanze".
Even the appearance of association with Nazis should set off giant warning flags. "Haha I used a German word that's generally associated with Nazis but isn't technically that, this is a joke I promise" almost always means that the person is a Nazi.
Well, they're doing torchhikes through the area near Nuremberg on their meetups, they send emails through relays with hostnames like "Wolfsschanze" and devs with official suckless flair post on [website that's basically a clone of HN] complaining about "cultural marxism".
Obviously, you still have to interpret that yourself, but these are the facts about the people behind suckless.
> they're doing torchhikes through the area near Nuremberg on their meetups
And?
> they send emails through relays with hostnames like "Wolfsschanze"
A single developer has a private machine named this. There is no plural "they" here.
> devs with official suckless flair post on [website that's basically a clone of HN] complaining about "cultural marxism".
I believe the flair is kind of "sticky" on Lobsters, so that's probably more of an accident than anything else. Regardless, it's a single developer voicing their personal opinion (the same as the one with the "Wolfsschanze" hostname) and there is no plural "they" here either.
Lobsters hats are not the same as e.g. reddit flairs, but rather something to specifically turn on when speaking in its context: "A hat is a formal, verified, way of posting a comment while speaking for a project, organization, or company. Each user may have multiple hats, one of which may be selected to be worn when posting a comment or sending a private message."
Yes, I am aware. But I believe how it works in the UI is that you select it for a post and then it will get automatically applied for all new posts until you turn it off (i.e. it's sticky, either for the thread or globally). Or at least, that's what I've been told as I don't have any "hats". So, it's pretty easy to accidentally apply it.
There is no single person who can speak "for" suckless in the same way some rep can speak "for" Microsoft or Y Combinator or whatnot, so that description doesn't really apply in the first place.
The number "88" can be. Norse mythology can be. A shaven head can be. Military boots can be. Lots of things can be, but you need look at the context. The entire point of a "dogwhistle" is that it looks innocent and that it can be easily confused as such, and this automatically means there are also plenty of innocent uses of such things. A "X is a dog-whistle for Y" assertion is meaningless.
Plus, "Vaguely right-wing" or even "extreme right-wing" is not identical to "Nazi".
Without context, maybe. But we have the context here, and so even if you pretend there is an actively used other sense it's patently obvious that the term is used in the "evil leftist world-conspiracy" sense.
Having read the "cultural Marxism" thread, I did not get the impression of "Nazi". I'd have to go find it, but I thought it was stupid and wrong, but really not that bad – certainly not as bad as people make it out to be, which just seems to hinge on the usage of a particular phrase. Even "evil leftist world-conspiracy" doesn't really apply IIRC, which is not the same as "Nazi" in any case. Have people forgotten that the genocide of millions of people was at the core of Nazi ideology?
Kulturbolschewismus (cultural bolshevism) was a Nazi coinage used to refer to a sinister Jewish conspiracy to undermine German culture with Bolshevik elements. The cultural Marxism meme is as explicitly Nazi as is "sieg heil" and "Arbeit macht frei".
I agree, but openbsd is actually the opposite of a minimal system, I can do more, out of the box, with an openbsd system than any linux distro I have tried, and yet openbsd feels minimal, openbsd manages to make a very rich system in ~ 1GB, a linux distro takes ~5gb and does less and windows takes ~20gb and I have no idea how it can use so much space and do so little.
The OpenBSD folks aren't exactly the most friendly folks, so don't think hanging out there is without drama. But at least they don't go out of their way to justify putting nazi imagery on their homepage.
Many times, when I see cool software projects are posted here, I go onto the about pages or personal blogs of the authors, to see what else they've made. And what I often see is a lot of absurd, hateful, deranged, wrong, extremist takes on their blogs and twitter feeds. Stuff that I find distasteful or outright horrifying. But they're leftist (or "centrist"), so there's no point complaining about it on HN.
I would bet 98% of all open-source software written is by left-wing or apolitical people. Suckless is one of the few islands of (crypto-)right wing outlook. And if that bothers you and you have to make a fuss, go ahead. But maybe ask yourself why you can't be satisfied with a mere 98%.
There are a lot of conservative, liberal, or left-wing people I disagree with. The difference between them and fascists is that they're not threatening to take away my right to disagree with them by violence, nor do they typically suggest that people like me and my friends should be killed or imprisoned for being who we are. This is a fundamental difference that can't be reduced to a "both sides have extremists" analysis.
Both the far left and the far right have told me I shouldn't have rights and that I should be sent to the camps. From my perspective it really is a 'both sides have extremists' situation.
> The difference between them and fascists is that they're not threatening to take away my right to disagree with them by violence
> nor do they typically suggest that people like me and my friends should be killed or imprisoned for being who we are
I think you should reevaluate that. Far too many people have been cancelled and imprisoned in the world by the self-righteous authoritarians you are defending right now.
Hell, I'm living in a country that's about to descend into literal communism mere days from now. Among the many laws they're going to implement, there are "political intolerance" laws that criminalize intolerance towards leftists in general society, in the job market and pretty much any context. It will be a crime to boycott a business if you don't agree with their politics, for example. They're calling it the "big democracy package" but I don't believe for a second the "right wing nazis" will receive any protection.
The president has said multiple times in the past decades that he intends to install socialism in Brazil. He's tried it before in past governments with plans to relativize private property rights, regulate the press, heavily tax great fortunes and whatnot. Even the press that campaigned for him relentlessly these last four years used to criticize that. There's a judiciary dictatorship on top of all that with the congress and senate being completely worthless, just like in Venezuela. Lula is now old, cancerous, with nothing to lose and vengeful due to being arrested for corruption and his party losing the previous election to "fascists". He was openly threatening other politicians who didn't ally with him even before the election. After the election, I saw him tell journalists they could work but "without badmouthing the government".
It's no exaggeration at all to believe this country is finished. Anyone who believed in a moderate government has already jumped ship and wished good luck to anyone still in this shithole. I'm thinking of getting the fuck out of here myself, I only hesitate because of my family.
Uh, in every possible way? Not once did I see him censoring anyone. Not even himself, in the numerous moments where he really should have kept his mouth shut. I didn't see him try to reappropriate private property to illegal invaders. He didn't create 10+ bullshit ministries, he instead sought to reduce the government machinery, bureaucracy, expenses and taxes.
If you think the next four years are going to be anything like the last four years or even the last two decades, I really don't know what to say.
Personally I don't really care about the Amazon at all. Developed countries exploited their own natural resources, what right do they have to condemn anyone else for doing the same? I'd happily sacrifice that entire jungle if it brought wealth and prosperity to the people of the brazilian north and northeast. This country seriously needs to develop those regions.
It's a moot point anyway. Bolsonaro no longer matters, and I'm not interested in discussing the past any longer. What matters is the future and it's not looking good. It looks like you have no comments to make on the future so I guess this is where this conversation ends.
> This is a fundamental difference that can't be reduced to a "both sides have extremists" analysis.
So tankies who glorify Stalin and would take away people's right to disagree with them by violent means and sometimes kill and/or imprison them, because "nazis" (and we've all witnessed a very prominent example of exactly this happening in 2022) are just not a thing in your worldview, I take it? "Both sides have extremists" is not just some throwaway remark or whataboutism, it's advising caution about a very real phenomenon.
It very much is. If you live in the USA, please be thankful that you have freedom of expression and a culture that values such rights. This is not the norm in many parts of the world.
> Suckless is one of the few islands of right wing outlook.
It has a concerning concentration of outright neo nazis.
If that's what you consider acceptable "right wing outlook", I can see how you'd consider "98% of all open-source software written is by left-wing or apolitical people [or "centrists"]", and that this is apparently bad.
st is my favorite terminal, and I use it daily. It crashes from time to time, but it's manageable.
I used surf as my main browser for a few years, until it refused to compile with the latest WebKitGTK a couple of years ago. I switched to Luakit, and have been mostly happy with the transition.
dwm was unusable for me the few times I tried it. It would crash constantly, and it just doesn't have the features of other lightweight WMs, even with all the patches. I settled on bspwm many years ago, and it's been rock solid.
rofi is better than dmenu. sxlock is better than slock.
I think OP will hit many roadblocks with this all-in suckless approach. There are better tools out there that are similarly lightweight, but with much better UX. You can save yourself many headaches by being pragmatic, and using the right tool for the job.