kasdeyaMay 18, 2024

suckless devs be like:

instead of making bloated software that tries to have every feature at once, and barely works,

let's use C to write software that's so oversimplified and lacking in features that it's unsuitable for almost any use case except my single hyperspecific one

like they've correctly identified a harmful philosophy and decided to do the polar opposite of that philosophy, and ended up with software that is so much worse than what they were trying to avoid

Show threadJolene (Meoww) 

@kasdeya we need a middle ground,

suckSome

it sucks a bit but not that much

May 18, 2024 at 12:53amWeb
Show threadwitch_t *naviMay 18, 2024
@tjhexf @kasdeya honestly most "diy DE" software (like the tools you'd use in combination with a window manager like sway/i3, bspwm, xmodad, etc) feels like that middle ground pretty well

simple config files, but files, not recompiling
just enough features to be extensible, but not too much to be bloated
does it's job well in your ecosystem

by that i mean tools like rofi, dunst, polybar/waybar, terminals like foot, alacritty, etc
Show threadHaelwenn /элвэн/ May 18, 2024
@navi @kasdeya @tjhexf XMonad config is a haskell program though, where xmonad works like a very high-level library with pre-configured values to make a window manager.
But UX-wise… it's nearly undistinguishable from a very powerful config, a bit like how many Unix programs use scripts for configuration.

While for suckless… I'd effectively say it's software driven by some opinion/ideal rather than practicalities, which you'd typically get from "itch-scratching-driven development".
And I often feel like most ideals of suckless would work better if it where in a actual OS like Plan9 where you can actually move things around to simplify either the software or the workflow, without just disregarding the actual needs.
Show threadwitch_t *naviMay 18, 2024
@lanodan @kasdeya @tjhexf i find it funny how suckless' called wayland bad on the mailing list because they moved rendering/compositing into "the window manager"

that argument only holds if you're implementing everything yourself, because if you take a look at it as a whole, x11 + dwm is a lot more complex than any wlroots compositor, just by the sheer fact of the massive mess of bloat and complexity that x11 is

but i guess for them using a library to offload the complexity on your app is bad...?
Show threadHaelwenn /элвэн/ May 18, 2024
@navi @kasdeya @tjhexf
Reminds me of this quote, which is even featured on http://quotes.cat-v.org/programming/
> The X server has to be the biggest program I’ve ever seen that doesn’t do anything for you.
> — Ken Thompson

The way I understand this one is that the X server *alone*, was absurdly gigantic (specially before video drivers moved to mesa and the kernel) but effectively provided nothing, as it would also require a bunch of companion programs to make any use of it, or even configure it (anyone remembers modelines?). At least typically also provided with the various X implementations, together with a bunch of various libraries and toolkits to simply use X11.
Plus X is also several times bigger than Rio (Plan9 display server).

Wayland meanwhile, you can write pretty simple display servers and clients (even clients which don't link to any C libraries, thanks to the machine-parseable protocol descriptions).
Programming Quotes

Show threadfeldMay 18, 2024
@lanodan @navi @kasdeya I remember being able destroy your monitor with bad configs
Show threadsarah tonin May 18, 2024
@navi @lanodan @kasdeya @tjhexf if they implemented everything themselves theyd be using wayland before rewriting an x server
Show thread9579cfc2-3e7d-35c7-af3b-cddda26f71bdMay 18, 2024
@navi
ok wayland is bad tho, it just looks ok because you're comparing it to X11.
@lanodan @kasdeya @tjhexf
Show threadwitch_t *naviMay 18, 2024
@lily

wayland has quite a lot of issues, yes
most of those are being worked on

and yes i compare it with x11 because that's all we have, x11, and wayland
Show thread9579cfc2-3e7d-35c7-af3b-cddda26f71bdMay 18, 2024

@navi
> most of those are being worked on

are they ever going to deal with the fact that the core protocol doesn't provide a way to open a new window?

Show threadwitch_t *naviMay 18, 2024
@lily the core protocol is not supposed to

you might have a wayland compositor meant for a kiosk panel that ever only displays a single application

it's pretty well defined on xdg-shell tho, the one meant for desktop use cases
Show threadlizzy  May 18, 2024
@navi @kasdeya @tjhexf xmonad is configured in haskell 🥴 it needs recompiles for the config files after you change them (but not of the entire program, due to dynamic linking)