Suckless Philosophy and Manifesto

More code often translates to more features on the ground, though. While I prefer to run software that is running on amazing, concise and well designed code - ultimately, none of these criteria come into my software selection.<p>If I have a choice of two pieces of software: (1) having a lot of features, not-too-bad start-up time, usable UI, and good compatibility with other software I need to use. (2) missing some important feature, fast start up, pretty UI, poor compatibility. Then I (and nearly everyone else) is going to choose option 1. Best example of this is, obviously, Microsoft Windows.<p>Comes down to something simple: the only people who care about the quality of the code are those who have to look at the code. Everyone else is only interested in the surface layer, and sometimes even bad code doesn't show up on the surface if it's been battle-hardened with enough bug fixes.

I like their philosophy, and I like the C language (its a beautiful minimal thing, although there is definite room for improvement). But making software that sucks less in C is still a hard sell.

To me, a "suck less" philosophy means that my environment should:<p>* Mount flash drives automatically when I plug them in.<p>* Let users configure the wireless network connection, and set it to automatically reconnect with the same settings to different APs on the same network, and let users override certificate settings for the same, and remember the overridden settings.<p>* Let users configure printer settings.<p>Sure, dwm is great if you spend all of your time in xterm and emacs/vim. But I spend at least 0.02% of my time doing the above tasks, and I don't want to inflate that number.<p>Some people believe that the fewer lines of code they write, the more elegant their software becomes. Bull. Just like writing more lines doesn't make your code better, writing fewer lines doesn't make it better.

I have used dwm as a window manager, along with dmenu for application selection. I tend to mix and match their stuff as I find the convenience of a desktop manager (gdm/slim) and a graphical file manager (thunar) useful. I'm glad they are around as an alternative!

"Many (open source) hackers are proud if they achieve large amounts of code, because they believe the more lines of code they’ve written, the more progress they have made"<p>Citation needed.

Nobody sets out to write bad code. It is easier not to suck if you can control / choose the scope of your project. But more often than not, the scope is dictated by a real-world set of complex needs and circumstances that evolve throughout the whole live of the project.<p>In the end, good UI, proper testing and responsive customer support play a bigger role in customer satisfaction than the quality of code.

I use dwm and sometimes st if I want a really quick terminal or need a really minimal one.