[HN Gopher] Software That Sucks Less
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Software That Sucks Less
        
       Author : jhallenworld
       Score  : 143 points
       Date   : 2021-01-12 19:11 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (suckless.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (suckless.org)
        
       | tathougies wrote:
       | Runit is amazing, and a great replacement for standard init on
       | embedded systems
        
         | arp242 wrote:
         | Yes, but it's not part of suckless.
        
       | jonatron wrote:
       | Slock is the only one I use, but it's great.
        
       | jezze wrote:
       | I see a lot of people here complain about their toxic community.
       | This was always the worst thing about suckless and it put a lot
       | of people off about trying to engage and help out, including me.
       | Luckily the most toxic of them all left a few years ago now and
       | the mailing list is now a lot better compared to how it used to
       | be. I'm not on irc anymore so dont know about the conversations
       | happening there but I hope it also has become better. Its
       | interesting how one persons bad influence can throw shade on an
       | entire community. Most of them are really nice.
        
       | zamalek wrote:
       | It boggles the mind that developers, who believe that software
       | should be minimal and do one thing well, attach toxic political
       | agendas to their software[1] for no good reason. From a pragmatic
       | standpoint Nazism (and all forms of racism) is pointless
       | expenditure of mental resources and over-complicates life in
       | general; which seems to conflict pretty strongly with their
       | claimed ethos for software.
       | 
       | [1]: https://twitter.com/kuschku/status/1156488420413362177
        
         | eznzt wrote:
         | Ever heard of codes of conduct?
        
           | zamalek wrote:
           | Sure, but I'm referring to a developer community who
           | specifically aims to create "software that does one thing and
           | one thing only." Having a political agenda is doing another
           | thing.
        
             | eznzt wrote:
             | They don't shove that political agenda into their software,
             | do they? It's just something they do as a group of friends.
        
               | caeril wrote:
               | You're living about ten years in the past.
               | 
               | Kicking contributors out of open source projects, or dis-
               | inviting speakers from technical conferences due to their
               | _purely personal_ opinions has been going on for a while
               | now.
               | 
               | You don't need to act on wrongthink to get unpersoned by
               | the mob.
               | 
               | This has, of course, led to a situation where there are
               | still a bunch of nazis, misogynists, etc, in our
               | profession and communities, but they've learned to STFU
               | and/or engage with much better OPSEC. So now you'll never
               | actually know. Out of sight, out of mind.
               | 
               | (to stay somewhat on-topic, yes, suckless, and dwm in
               | particular, is awesome)
        
         | paedubucher wrote:
         | Please also consider looking at the other picture of the same
         | conference: https://suckless.org/conferences/2017/
         | 
         | "But Hitler also started his movement in the Bierkeller!!!1"
         | ;-)
        
           | combo6000 wrote:
           | --- sck lSS ---
        
         | bitwize wrote:
         | Actually it makes perfect sense.
         | 
         | In order to truly democratize access to computers, you must
         | meet your users where they are. That means you have to put in a
         | lot of hard work and abandon your academic elitist norms of
         | "elegance" in favor of _empathy_. The real world is messy, your
         | users have messy minds, so your software is going to be
         | accordingly complex and messy. Embrace this. Your users will be
         | better off for it.
         | 
         | Empathy is inimical to the Unix philosophy. "Do one thing and
         | do it well" forces the user to cobble solutions together out of
         | the tools they have lying around, and not all of them can do
         | this. This causes stress. The empathetic programmer seeks to
         | minimize stress by putting everything the user may wish to do
         | within their reach, the unempathetic programmer just doesn't
         | care. If you can't understand the system on its own terms,
         | well, sucks to be you. This creates a hierarchy of haves and
         | have-nots: power users, hackers, and the l33t who can engage
         | with the system on its own terms, and "lusers" who cannot
         | engage with it meaningfully at all, which suits the power users
         | just fine -- that's the endgame of Unix-philosophy
         | fundamentalism.
         | 
         | Nazism and fascism are political philosophies embraced by
         | unempathetic people, so it's no surprise that the empathy-
         | deficient Unix-philosophy hardliners also turn out to be Nazis.
        
           | transmogrifex wrote:
           | git gud scrub
        
           | arp242 wrote:
           | Congratulations, you've made the most ridiculous comment I've
           | ever seen on HN. I can't stop laughing.
           | 
           | The only lack of empathy I see here is a failure in
           | understanding that not everyone uses computers in the same
           | way as you prefer. That's okay, we're all different. You can
           | do your thing and what works for you, and I'll do mine and
           | what works for me.
           | 
           | Signed.
           | 
           | One of those unempathetic Unix types and Nazi.
        
         | paedubucher wrote:
         | I smirked a bit when I saw that picture, because the camo
         | trousers and the bald heads look a bit edgy in that context.
         | But hiking with torches is nothing strange here, at least not
         | in Switzerland. We often do this in the winter, for example
         | when walking to a Christmas dinner together with all the
         | employees from the company.
        
           | monopoledance wrote:
           | In Germany this has a very clear Gschmackle and is not a
           | common activity. Unless you are a Nazi. Then it's all about
           | Fackelmarsche, of course.
        
           | nix23 wrote:
           | >But hiking with torches is nothing strange here, at least
           | not in Switzerland.
           | 
           | Yes true, and half of the males have the Springerstiefel
           | (from the militaryservice) on, because they have no other
           | watertight shoes at home.
        
           | zamalek wrote:
           | Is calling a mail server "Wolfsschanze" also common in
           | Switzerland?
        
             | arp242 wrote:
             | Going from a single host name to "literal Nazis!" is quite
             | the leap. And everything else like "they walked with
             | torches, ergo they must be Nazis" is not even leap, but
             | just outright BS.
        
               | bitwize wrote:
               | They also railed against "cultural marxism" which is a
               | dogwhistle phrase coined and used by -- wait for it --
               | the Nazis.
               | 
               | When you take together all the fashy things they do, it
               | kind of establishes a pattern that maaaaybe they _don 't_
               | believe in brotherhood and equality.
        
               | arp242 wrote:
               | Like I said, there's some context to that; quoting from
               | the thread:
               | 
               |  _" I took some more time to read it up and from what I
               | could see, I found that indeed cultural marxism has
               | become more of a political slogan rather than a normal
               | theoretical term in the USA.
               | 
               | Here in Germany the term "Kulturmarxismus" is much less
               | politically charged from what I can see and thus I was
               | surprised to get this response after I just had
               | "translated" this term into English. It might be a lesson
               | to first get some background on how this might be
               | perceived internationally, however, it is a gigantic task
               | for every term that might come around to you.
               | 
               | So to reiterate my question, what term could be better
               | used instead? :)"_
               | 
               | I don't speak German well enough to really have an
               | opinion on the veracity of the claims here, but I see no
               | reason to immediately assume the worst or to doubt that
               | this is how _this particular person_ intended to use this
               | term. People get confused about language all the time,
               | and I 'd rather look at the full context instead of
               | getting all hung up on a single term.
               | 
               | This is not an endorsement of those views - far from it -
               | but I really take issue how people just just to the worst
               | possible conclusions on things like this.
               | 
               | [1]:
               | https://lobste.rs/s/nf3xgg/i_am_leaving_llvm#c_lfctpe
        
             | paedubucher wrote:
             | No, that's not common. I guess that their humor is beyond
             | edgy for most people. A related page is cat-v.org, which
             | contains similar edgy jokes (see "Herrensystem 9"
             | http://glenda.cat-v.org/gallery/)
        
               | bitwize wrote:
               | Dropping casual fash references means you probably are
               | fash. We've moved on from not taking edgelord Nazi
               | references seriously since the late 2000s.
               | 
               | I knew suckless were assholes whose software philosophy
               | was unworkable in the real world, but their casual nazism
               | just makes me want to avoid them more.
        
               | skissane wrote:
               | The fact that it also jokes about Erich Honecker makes it
               | seem like it is more about a like for bad taste jokes
               | than a like for Nazism.
               | 
               | East German Communism and Nazism were both odious, but
               | they are largely incompatible forms of odiousnesses.
        
         | vlovich123 wrote:
         | The "do one thing and do it well ethos" is a UNIX academic
         | philosophy, specifically around command line tools. Most
         | software neither write code like that nor necessarily ascribe
         | to such a philosophy.
         | 
         | I can both hate the ideology and accept the software as having
         | utility for me (not that I think I've used any of it, but in
         | principle I have no problem with people being fascinated by
         | TempleOS even though I am against a lot of the things the
         | author has stated he stands for).
        
       | imiric wrote:
       | Great tools and philosophy on software. I think their political
       | views and whatever online drama they're involved in is hardly
       | relevant to my enjoyment of their software.
       | 
       | st is my favorite terminal and surf my favorite web browser. It
       | does take some effort to add the features you need and to keep
       | them updated, but once everything is in place they're a joy to
       | use.
       | 
       | The development on surf has stagnated in recent years, a few
       | sites are unusable for me and the performance is terrible
       | compared to mainstream browsers, but the simplicity and
       | customization more than make up for it.
       | 
       | surf would make a great base to build a simple browser for the
       | masses, if a competent C developer would polish some of these
       | issues and added a more user friendly UI, while still staying
       | true to the suckless philosophy. But so far unfortunately I
       | haven't seen a particular fork pick up steam.
        
         | boogies wrote:
         | > a simple browser for the masses [with] more user friendly UI
         | 
         | I think you mean GNOME Web/Epiphany. They both use
         | libwebkit2gtk (https://webkitgtk.org/) as a base (as does
         | luakit, a fairly simple and customizable browser that I'll
         | probably switch to if/when Palemoon breaks Pentadactyl).
        
           | imiric wrote:
           | I've tried Epiphany, but it's still too bloated for my
           | preferences, not customizable enough and I'd like to keep
           | GNOME packages out of my system. :)
           | 
           | Luakit is more to my liking, and I think I gave it a try a
           | few years ago but can't remember what put me off about it. At
           | first glance it has features I don't need like adblocking (I
           | use a DNS blocker on my router) and tabs, but it's promising.
           | I'll give it another try, thanks.
           | 
           | I've also tried a few of these libwebkitgtk wrappers like
           | qutebrowser, dwb, lariza, uzbl, etc. but they all had some
           | drawbacks compared to surf.
           | 
           | And I can't say I trust the Palemoon or Waterfox developers
           | to maintain a Firefox fork. It's a gargantuan job, which is
           | why I prefer the relative simplicity of the WebKit wrappers.
           | Ideally I'd like to switch to a simpler rendering engine as
           | well, but sadly the modern web is built with WebKit
           | compatibility in mind.
        
       | Barrin92 wrote:
       | the strange nazism aside which is bad enough I honestly think
       | their programming philosophy sucks.
       | 
       | Why is it sensible to configure a software in C and having to
       | recompile it every time I make a change? Patching software
       | through diffs is error prone and you basically have to fiddle
       | around with the order as to not accidentally mess up your entire
       | program, it makes the software basically non-extensible in a sane
       | way because there's no interface between extension and core code.
       | The line number limits on code also incentivize spaghetti code.
       | If you want software that sucks less you don't need fewer line
       | numbers, you need good program structure and design.
        
         | tathougies wrote:
         | Nazism?
        
           | zarkov99 wrote:
           | You know, one day we might see real Nazis but we won't have a
           | word for them anymore.
        
           | recursive wrote:
           | Elsewhere in the thread, it's noted that they maintain a mail
           | server that's named after some nazi stronghold or something.
        
             | LukeShu wrote:
             | Not a mail server, an individual person's laptop.
             | 
             |  _> these mails originate from a host called
             | "wolfsschanze", which appears to be the laptop a certain
             | Laslo Hunhold works from (their conf organizer?)_
             | 
             | -- the tweet in the thread that you're mentioning
        
             | necrotic_comp wrote:
             | It's probably just poor humor, but it doesn't reflect well
             | on them.
        
               | fossuser wrote:
               | I'm less likely to assume humor given what's going on in
               | politics.
               | 
               | You can think marxism sucks (I do) without torchlight
               | marches and nazi naming schemes.
               | 
               | The latter is something else.
        
               | MajesticHobo2 wrote:
               | In addition to that, "Cultural Marxism" doesn't just
               | refer to Marxism. It's an antisemitic canard used pretty
               | much exclusively by the far right.
        
               | recursive wrote:
               | FWIW this was all several years ago. I don't know if the
               | mail server still exists with the same name.
               | 
               | And I still don't know what's wrong with a torchlight
               | hike/march. (They call it a hike, you call it a march) It
               | sounds like something I'd do.
        
               | varjag wrote:
               | They did Tiki torch march a couple weeks after
               | Charlottesville, which am sure is just another
               | unfortunate coincidence. Can happen to anyone!
        
               | flukus wrote:
               | They did it in Germany, where Charlottesville was likely
               | a 30 second news clip that everyone forgot about.
               | 
               | Stop with the cultural imperialism, race relations in the
               | US are rather unique.
        
               | varjag wrote:
               | I am in Europe, it was top news for many days.
        
               | fossuser wrote:
               | Maybe it's just wildly bad self-awareness mixed with
               | being obnoxious, but maybe it's not:
               | https://www.cnn.com/2017/08/12/us/white-nationalists-
               | tiki-to...
               | 
               | The torches are used as a symbol - might be nothing, but
               | paired with speaking out against cultural marxism it's
               | more likely to be intentional than it otherwise would be.
               | 
               | I don't know, but I'm not giving them the benefit of the
               | doubt since the mail server is fairly explicit if true.
               | 
               | When people tell you who they are, believe them.
        
           | Rotten194 wrote:
           | I think they're referring to this?:
           | https://twitter.com/kuschku/status/1156488420413362177
           | 
           | disclaimer: found on Google, unsure of context / if these
           | people are core developers, just sharing for those who like
           | me were also confused
        
             | generalizations wrote:
             | Sounds like there's too much being read into it.
             | 
             | I use st, it's one of the best terminal emulators I've
             | found, and I'm not going to stop using it just because some
             | possibly-associated dev made a kinda-sorta-tasteless joke
             | when they named some random server.
        
             | arp242 wrote:
             | It's just a social event they did. Nothing to it. The
             | conversation continued a bit with a discussion on what
             | exactly what means with "cultural marxism", and it's not as
             | bas as this snippet might make it appear. But can't add
             | context lest people give the benefit of the doubt, ey?
        
               | dijit wrote:
               | I actually like suckless software and I'm a little (lot)
               | annoyed by the overwhelming "sides" of politics,
               | especially the left because a lot of US tech comes from a
               | left wing belief and sometimes people online beat me over
               | the head with it and make me annoyed.
               | 
               | But, to be clear, there are three things here:
               | 
               | 1) They're doing a Tiki Torch walk, during a time when it
               | was heavily politicised.
               | 
               | 2) They're adapting Nazi slogans as hostnames
               | 
               | 3) They're denigrating "Cultural Marxism".
               | 
               | Any one of these alone I would probably defend, but 3 is
               | a pattern and not a good one.
        
               | arp242 wrote:
               | > 1) They're doing a Tiki Torch walk, during a time when
               | it was heavily politicised.
               | 
               | No it wasn't; just in the US. Not everyone in the world
               | is obsessed with the latest drama in the US.
               | 
               | I've done many torchwalks with scouts. In fact, they're
               | used to celebrate the end of the Nazi occupation in my
               | home town every single year on Sept 18th. Should we stop
               | doing this because some yahoos on the other side of the
               | world used some torches in some far-right march? This is
               | "Hitler has a moustache, you have a moustache, ergo you
               | must be a Nazi"-kind of logic.
               | 
               | > 2) They're adapting Nazi slogans as hostnames
               | 
               | A private server belonging to a single person, not the
               | project. I have asked him plainly and directly about that
               | and he avoided the question. I am also not impressed by
               | this, but that doesn't make him a Nazi, and it certainly
               | doesn't make everyone involved in the project a Nazi.
               | 
               | > 3) They're denigrating "Cultural Marxism".
               | 
               | A single person is (same one as the hostname). And like I
               | said, there is a lot more to that conversation than the
               | screenshot makes it out to be as there was a lot of
               | confusion about what's intended with "cultural marxism".
               | I really recommend you read the entire conversation in
               | full, and while I don't personally agree with their take,
               | it's also really not that bad.
        
               | [deleted]
        
           | [deleted]
        
         | boogies wrote:
         | Strange arguable libel aside, you don't have to compile your wm
         | or terminal every time you make a change. There are awesomewm
         | (and echinus and spectrwm and Qtile et al.), and xterm and
         | GNOME Terminal and guake and konsole and xfce terminal and
         | Terminator and Terminology and Tilda and Yakuake and rxvt et
         | al., many al.: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/List_of_app
         | lications/Ut....
         | 
         | Setting all those aside, you can configure any decent text
         | editor to run `make` whenever you save, and I dare you to find
         | any combination of patches for any single suckless software
         | (except surf) that takes more than 1000 milliseconds to compile
         | with tcc on a computer you use on a regular basis (should work
         | for any normal desk/laptop from the past decade or two).
        
         | drhastings wrote:
         | Have you tried it?
         | 
         | I've not experienced any of those problems while using dwm for
         | the past several years.
         | 
         | Where I wasn't able to find an existing diff supporting my
         | desired customizations I found the code easy to understand and
         | extend myself.
         | 
         | Find me some spaghetti code in the codebase and your point
         | might be a little more convincing to me.
        
         | Spivak wrote:
         | Yeah, I'm not really sure if DRYing yourself to death is a good
         | approach to software development. Ansible is really really easy
         | to hack on and it's ~1.2mil LOC which probably horrifies the
         | suckless devs.
        
           | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
           | I suspect a good deal of that 1.2M lines is in modules, isn't
           | it? Rather like how people remark on how many lines are in
           | Linux and overlook that it's overwhelmingly in drivers and
           | the actual core system is much smaller.
        
         | alex_smart wrote:
         | Have you even taken a look at their source code? I have read
         | plenty of open source projects and suckless's code is about as
         | unspaghettilike as it gets. I find their approach to
         | programming a beautiful contrast to the piles of garbage upon
         | other piles of garbage style over-engineered approach I have
         | seen elsewhere.
        
         | raspyberr wrote:
         | Well stuff like dwm and st should get reconfigured rarely so
         | this doesn't matter. And it recompiles blazingly fast anyway.
        
           | flukus wrote:
           | Yep, my dwm re-compiles, installs and restarts faster than a
           | theme change in gnome.
        
       | MayeulC wrote:
       | I quite like suckless software, unfortunately it is very
       | X-centric.
       | 
       | Not sure what their view on Wayland is?
        
         | spijdar wrote:
         | I can't speak for the group, but my guess is in practice they
         | would dislike the Wayland ecosystem. A cursory google seems to
         | show this too.
         | 
         | A lot of their tooling and favored software works by being as
         | minimal as possible while doing its one primary purpose well.
         | They dislike monoliths like systemd, pulseaudio, networkmanager
         | etc. which do many tasks. The wayland protocol itself is fairly
         | minimalist, which they seem to like, but to practically use it
         | you end up requiring a monolith compositor/window server.
         | 
         | Further, Wayland fundamentally doesn't support running e.g. in
         | a non-compositing mode, and requires more cruft to draw to the
         | screen vs just using xlib.
         | 
         | At the end of the day, all the functionality that Xorg provided
         | has to be served by something. And when you're not using one of
         | the big boy software stacks like Gnome or KDE, that means re-
         | implementing the wheel, or copying from another project like
         | wlroots. I suspect they prefer the status quo in that Xorg is
         | at least proven and fairly battle hardened software.
         | 
         | Just idly guessing, though.
        
           | yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
           | It kinda cuts both ways, I suspect. Xorg is itself a huge
           | monolithic mess, but it takes all the messy bits into itself
           | and lets you extend it with nice small programs (ex. window
           | managers, screenshot programs, keybinding programs,
           | whatever). Wayland is in some ways actually better because it
           | removes the massive central mess that is the X server... but
           | then forces every other component to deal with those things,
           | and does so in ways that to date play badly with
           | composability in the software (ex. now a "window manager" is
           | a compositor and must do most of what the X server did
           | before, _and_ you can 't factor out things like screen
           | capture because that functionality is restricted).
        
         | hnlmorg wrote:
         | There's a lot of CLI tools in suckless too. I quite like their
         | IRC client https://tools.suckless.org/ii/
        
       | jolmg wrote:
       | Some projects seem missing from the site. For example, this used
       | to be the home of wmi[1] and wmii[2], the ancestors of i3.
       | 
       | There's quite a bit to see if one browses the site through the
       | WaybackMachine.
       | 
       | I could've sworn it was also the home of i3 at one point, but I
       | can't find it in the history, so maybe I'm mistaken about that. I
       | also thought all 3 were started by the same author, but I'm not
       | so sure anymore. EDIT: It was different people. Anselm R. Garbe
       | started wmi and wmii, Michael Stapelberg started i3.
       | 
       | [1]
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20090315090203/http://wmi.suckle...
       | 
       | [2]
       | https://web.archive.org/web/20090315090203/http://wmii.suckl...
        
         | tfolbrecht wrote:
         | You're probably thinking of dwm. Another great tiling window
         | manager.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | asciimov wrote:
       | I've been using both dwm and dmenu for about a year now. I enjoy
       | them as they do their thing and get out of the way.
        
         | stevefolta wrote:
         | I switched to dwm a couple of weeks ago after using Ratpoison
         | for years and years, and I'm super happy with it. It solves the
         | things that bugged me about Ratpoison. The one feature I was
         | missing was very easy to add myself (the equivalent of "set
         | padding" in monocle mode).
        
         | paedubucher wrote:
         | I've been using dwm since 2010 and and still don't consider
         | changing that. I use st at home (qterminal at work). dwm in
         | combination with dmenu, slstatus, and slock runs fast on every
         | machine with minimal resources and doesn't waste a pixel of
         | your screen.
        
         | boogies wrote:
         | Same, plus st, which doesn't even do tmux's (or their tool
         | scroll1's) scrollback thing and get a scrollbar or extraneous
         | scrolling key bindings in the way (unless you apply the
         | scrollback patch2).
         | 
         | 1https://git.suckless.org/scroll/file/README.html
         | 2https://st.suckless.org/patches/scrollback/
        
       | jhallenworld wrote:
       | I recently found out about them for "tabbed" (in the tools
       | project)- converts xterm into a tabbed terminal emulator.
        
       | leephillips wrote:
       | I love their software and their attitude.
       | 
       | I've been using dwm for years and it's the perfect window
       | manager. Configuration by editing the header and recompiling
       | makes sense when compilation takes under a second.
       | 
       | I'm not much of a C programmer, but I like that I can sort of
       | understand their code. A window manager in 2000 lines means that
       | if I wanted to I could understand how the whole thing works.
       | 
       | It's all refreshing, and even, I would say, beautiful. I like
       | that my environment uses very little memory, leaving my ram for
       | actually doing things.
        
       | Kuinox wrote:
       | Wonderful.
       | 
       | dwm, dmenu, and st.
       | 
       | Good naming is required to have code of good quality. These name
       | are too short, they lack of clarity.
       | 
       | A good name is concise, give the point, and is pronoucable.
        
         | KingMachiavelli wrote:
         | I love the names:
         | 
         | dynamic window manager, dynamic menu, suckless terminal
         | 
         | The names are all very clear once you know the naming
         | convention.
        
           | koenigdavidmj wrote:
           | dwm: Don't care what the D stands for, but there are a bunch
           | of X11 window managers ending in 'wm' so that's probably what
           | this is too.
           | 
           | dmenu: Since it's coming from the same place as dwm, it's
           | probably a menu app that goes well with it.
           | 
           | st isn't obvious, I agree, but it makes sense to give a short
           | name to the program you use most frequently.
        
             | makapuf wrote:
             | I can agree, but the terminal emulator is something I very
             | rarely launch from the command line. I run it from a menu,
             | or an icon. Maybe with keyboard but then its meta+T
        
           | Kuinox wrote:
           | The origin of the name are clear, but the name itself should
           | describe what is it because these name can be find out of
           | context.
           | 
           | These names can't be easily understandood without context.
           | And these name will be found without context: For exemple,
           | you may meet this name in a process list. In this case you
           | don't understand why the process "dwm" is eating a lot of gpu
           | power.
           | 
           | A variable name can be short, because it's name will be found
           | in it's context.
        
             | asymptosis wrote:
             | I guess you're not a fan of "du", "df" or "su" either.
        
               | Kuinox wrote:
               | No I'm not a fan of them either, I forgot their name all
               | the times and need to google them every year when I need
               | to cleanup my seedbox.
        
             | Mediterraneo10 wrote:
             | Suckless tools are meant for hardcore *nix hackers who
             | already know how to look up this information, so no, the
             | naming doesn't really matter. Anyone who knows how to use
             | the ps command will also know the man command, so if
             | someone wants to know what that dwm process is, they can
             | just do "man dwm".
        
               | Kuinox wrote:
               | "My name is not bad, every words that is in it can be
               | found in the latin dictionary."
        
           | geofft wrote:
           | Is that a convention, or just what they stand for? (Do the
           | window manager and the menu suck, because they don't have the
           | "s" prefix? Is st static because it doesn't have the "d"
           | prefix? Why do we abbreviate "terminal" but not "menu" / why
           | not follow the established abbreviation of "term" as in
           | xterm, dtterm, eterm, etc.? How come the "s" prefix in sprop
           | and sselp stands for "simple" instead of "suckless"?)
        
             | Shared404 wrote:
             | It's enough of a convention that after knowing it I can
             | read through their list and know what I'm looking at.
             | 
             | Seems like enough to me.
        
             | chacha2 wrote:
             | Wait till you hear what the rest of the English language is
             | doing...
        
         | paedubucher wrote:
         | Is plan9 a good name for an operating system? It's named after
         | (arguably) the worst movie ever. It's even bad as a trash
         | movie. Is the code quality of plan9 bad?
        
           | nix23 wrote:
           | And Linux is named after a rude developer..or Washing-
           | soap..who knows. An Oracle is the opposite you want of a
           | Database, but Intel made a really good promise for others
           | (Meltdown's). Google the searchengine is written wrong ->
           | Goggles and and and ;)
        
             | kubanczyk wrote:
             | > Google the searchengine is written wrong -> Goggles
             | 
             | A ha! One of today's Lucky 10000... https://xkcd.com/1053/
        
             | officeplant wrote:
             | Wait do you really think Google is referencing Goggles and
             | not Googolplex?
        
               | Aeronwen wrote:
               | Googol 10^100 not Googolplex 10^(10^100).
               | 
               | Googol or goggles, it's still just a typo someone decided
               | to keep in mind for a name.
        
               | nix23 wrote:
               | Yeah they try to rewrite history i think, but if you look
               | at the old logo the G looks like Goggles, it's also more
               | logic to call your search-engine goggle, and not a
               | number, but anything is better then BackRub.
        
           | Kuinox wrote:
           | Are you comparing an operating system with a window manager ?
           | 
           | We name products with odd name because they are products, you
           | want to be different.
           | 
           | Parts of this product are rarely named differently, a
           | windshield is still called a windshield, not a "wdsd".
        
             | nix23 wrote:
             | >a windshield is still called a windshield, not a "wdsd".
             | 
             | Embraer calls it's Side-Windows in the Cockpit DV's (Direct
             | Vision)
             | 
             | SSD's have no Disk.
             | 
             | My WM is called i3 my File-manger Thunar or MC..Firefox
             | whatever that is, git? Java? Go? C the successor of B..
        
               | recursive wrote:
               | I assumed the D stood for drive.
        
               | nix23 wrote:
               | Hmm, it looks from this article all three are used:
               | 
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
               | 
               | >sometimes called a solid-state device or a solid-state
               | disk
        
               | Kuinox wrote:
               | SSD litteraly mean Solid State Drive.
               | 
               | Embrear does marketing, adding shiny names make it look
               | better, it's like retina, it mean nothing but people
               | think it mean it's a good screen.
               | 
               | IMO i3 is badly named, I did read it multiple time _in
               | context_ and I only found out later that it was a window
               | manager..
               | 
               | git, java, go and c and are pronouncable name and are
               | most of the time in context.
               | 
               | It's funny that you put firefox in the middle, because
               | when an old person I know started to use computers for
               | his first time, I learned him to use Chrome. When I came
               | back several week later, he was using Internet Explorer.
               | Why ? Because it's called Internet Explorer and he forgot
               | about chrome.
        
               | nix23 wrote:
               | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
               | 
               | >sometimes called a solid-state device or a solid-state
               | disk
               | 
               | >and are most of the time in context.
               | 
               | With git your are right
               | 
               | >because when an old person I know started to use
               | computers for his first time, I learned him to use
               | Chrome.
               | 
               | That's why you exchange the Chrome icon with the Internet
               | explorer one, but let's just call everything Browser or
               | WWW-Explorer ok?
               | 
               | > I did read it multiple time _in context_ and I only
               | found out later that it was a window manager..
               | 
               | Then work on your internal memory system and don't blame
               | others for it...btw i3 is also a Car, not that your even
               | more confused next time when someone wants to show you a
               | i3 in a Parking slot.
        
       | MisterTea wrote:
       | https://harmful.neocities.org/
        
         | snarfy wrote:
         | A good friend introduced me to suckless many years ago. he
         | tried contributing but was shut down at ever turn. They are a
         | very closed group.
        
         | rectang wrote:
         | This appears to an insider rant against suckless. It starts off
         | like so:
         | 
         | > clearing some things up re: cat-v
         | 
         | > [context: this was produced for a particular community. if
         | this doesnt mean anything to you, dont worry]
         | 
         | > i am not within cat-v, i.e. "one of them" or a particular
         | friend of anyone within it, but it was quite formative for me
         | (on the technical side) from when i was about 14 years old, and
         | i would like to provide the requisite context to view the whole
         | ordeal charitably, and clear up some misconceptions suckless
         | 
         | > first of all, suckless are shitheels. fuck em six ways to
         | sunday.
        
         | jd3 wrote:
         | (not the OP of that site, but here are my 2C/)
         | 
         | I started really getting into computers and open source
         | software around 2010/2011 and cat-v (I was first introduced to
         | golang through uriel pereira's[0] proselytization) and suckless
         | were both a pretty big inspiration to me at the time.
         | 
         | I used dwm/st for years, but have since transitioned back to
         | using ctwm/xterm as I find them more approachable and easier to
         | use/extend. xterm may be "bloated and unmaintainable" according
         | to the suckless community[1], but it has low latency, a pretty
         | simple config, solid UTF-8 support, and is installed by default
         | in most X11 environments that I use (I need to bounce around
         | Windows/macOS/*bsd a lot).
         | 
         | Personally, I think the biggest problem is that there is
         | definitely a bit of ego involved in these respective
         | communities. When I tried participating back in ~2011, rather
         | than realizing I was an impressionable high schooler/teenage
         | kid who could use a solid mentor to guide them through the
         | fundamentals of X11/C/go/etc, I was instead basically laughed
         | out of the irc channel which led me to never participate in
         | their community again and instead just learn/work on projects
         | on my own.
         | 
         | I am still aesthetically interested in a lot of the
         | cat-v/suckless software, but the
         | politics/drama/exclusivity/negativity of it all (particularly
         | in the early 2010s) steered me away from ever really
         | participating in their respective communities.
         | 
         | I am also less interested in tooling/ui/customization than I
         | was back then, so I basically just tend to use whatever program
         | gets the job done rather than obsessing over
         | theory/purity/minimalism. I don't have a problem with those who
         | do care about these things (I am not trying to criticize
         | suckless as they do do a lot of great work), it's just no
         | longer something I think about as much.
         | 
         | [0]: http://uriel.cat-v.org/
         | 
         | [1]: https://st.suckless.org/
         | 
         | http://cs.gettysburg.edu/~duncjo01/sites/berlinblue/
        
           | arp242 wrote:
           | > I was an impressionable high schooler/teenage kid who could
           | use a solid mentor to guide them through the fundamentals of
           | X11/C/go/etc, I was instead basically laughed out of the irc
           | channel
           | 
           | I think people there can definitely be jerks sometimes, and I
           | don't really like the negativity either.
           | 
           | But on the other hand, not _every_ place and community on the
           | internet needs to be welcoming to teenagers and mentor them
           | through the fundamentals of X11 /C/Go.
           | 
           | I just wish people were a bit less of a jerk about it. Then
           | again, I _have_ said this nicely to people a few times over
           | the years ( "hey, cool you're interested, but note this is
           | really intended for expert users"), and it's about a 50/50
           | toss-up about whether or not you'll get insults and an
           | aggressive reply back. One time this guy got so triggered
           | over this that he went to several subs to tell everyone what
           | a horrible person I was just for (nicely!) explaining that
           | they didn't really seem to be the intended target audience.
           | 
           | Turns out that being a programmer means you're obliged to
           | help strangers out on the internet, according to some anyway
           | *shrug*.
           | 
           | > I basically just tend to use whatever program gets the job
           | done rather than obsessing over theory/purity/minimalism
           | 
           | That's pretty much why I use dwm; I use a hacked-up version
           | and I somehow managed to lose the source code for that 2
           | years ago (not sure how...) but it's okay, because it Just
           | Works(tm). It's very stable, never changes, and I never need
           | to look at it or worry that an update will break anything or
           | will move things around ("now where did that button go?!")
           | 
           | For me, suckless is very much a pragmatical thing, not a
           | "minimalist ideological" thing.
        
         | musicale wrote:
         | > they are cargo-cult idiots who do things like unironically
         | create a linux distribution with static linking as a design
         | goal and namesake
         | 
         | I've always wondered at the docker images that a) include their
         | own shared libraries and b) typically only run a single
         | process. Seems like static linking would be fine.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2021-01-12 23:00 UTC)