Why Suckless¤

I love suckless software.

I have a pretty emotional relation with my machine and its OS, spending so much time with it. And although I had a "perfect" OSX setup (not that I'm smart but I fiddled over a decade to improve it via BTT, Alfred, Hammerspoon, (...), I got more and more ...irritated by the general behaviour of Apple, the megacorp, especially after Steve Jobs passed away from us.

It was not not even their crap hardware they released at time of my switch in 2018 (F keys removed for an emojibar, no self repairability, throttling, broken keyboards, dongle hell). Because the machine which I used and loved was anyway a 2015 15' retina MBP, which I consider still a perfect pro-hardware for software devs in my area of work.
And in 2020 they solved a lot of their problems in admittedly impressive ways, with M1.

No, rationally there were good reasons to work on Linux directly and not in VMs or Containers, with the software in my area of work running on Linux.

But why suckless?

Switching to Linux, just to get a cheap attempt to be more "fancy" than OSX and also even more "politically correct" than Apple, was no option...

Then I stumbled over Luke Smith and DT and learned with great excitement that there is this other, lean and clean but still very efficient way of interacting with the machine: The Window Manager only way. And looking around whats there, you sooner or later hit suckless. Most WMs are derived from it, e.g. XMonad. The whole WM is only 2k sloc(!) and it compiles in < 1 second(!)

Yes qtile was actually the more sensible choice for a python guy like me but dwm code was so easy to read that I could, even as a C noob, even hack into it - plus: it's directly on the X11 libs and not hidden, like with qtile, by large frameworks in between.

So: You can read the code and learn how a WM under X11 actually works.

And its not just the WM:

You learn that it was suckless who really invented how fzf, rofi and all these pipe-able list selection tools work - with dmenu.
Then you'll learn how a terminal works - using st. If you ever tried to compile a VTE based, and I did because I wanted to change sth in terminator, you'll understand how simple (in the best sense possible) st is. And what bloat free really means, in terms of direct advantages.
and they have so many more lean and clean tools like tabbed.