[snhly]

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.

[imiric]

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.

[snhly]

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.

[yakak]

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.

[imiric]

> 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.

[wkat4242]

> 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.