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by rollcat 913 days ago
> [...] I am skeptical of the idea that any one window manager could accommodate the needs of GNOME, compiz (yay cubes), and dwm.

I am a former dwm user (contributed patches too), and I'd say we represent a group of marginal importance. Suckless is as much a philosophy as it is a lifestyle choice. It proves that simplistic software can be practical, but skims over many in-depth issues, such as accessibility.

Once we get the elitists out of the way, the needs of the 99.99% are not that hard to meet: Windows & macOS combined market share more than proves it; tools like Hammerspoon or AutoHotkey fill the gaps for most power users.

> You'd also bake in technical choices that would sit badly with chunks of the population; odds are that we would have ended up baking most of GNOME into the graphical server and being stuck using javascript for everything, or gone the other way and committed to using C forever.

Hammerspoon uses Lua; macOS doesn't even ship a Lua interpreter or ObjC bindings.

Also, the majority of the population is not technically competent enough to even care about decisions such as JavaScript vs Guile vs Bash; power users in practice turn out patient enough to put up with garbage like AppleScript, because it gets work done.

The continued prevalence of memory unsafe languages is unfortunate, but a well-written and well-maintained C project used by a million people is going to provide more value than an absolute marvel of engineering, written in Rust, used by a hundred.