 Hey everybody, welcome back to the channel. Today, I'm going to be talking a little bit about suckless software. So I've been using DWM and ST and I even downloaded surf. I haven't used surf as much for the last couple months. And I really, really like DWM so much so that I haven't switched away from it. It's now my daily driver. But suckless software sucks. It's not good without some work. And that's what we're going to talk about today. So let me just show you what my suckless desktop looks like here. This is just DWM. It's a highly riced, highly patched version of DWM. And you can find that in my GitHub repository which I will link in the description below. But what you see here is the result of weeks of work really of perfecting DWM. It's actually my second install of DWM. I actually wiped out the folder completely at one point and recompiled it and you know, without any patches and repatched everything I needed to just with the patches that I knew I needed. Because the first time I did it, I had to experiment with patches and your code gets messy and patches start to fail to be patched. And you know, it's not a good experience. So I had to start over with the patches. So out of the box, suckless software is almost unusable is the way I would say it is. There's so many things that just won't do or does weirdly. Things like the order that Windows appear in can't be changed. Also, moving Windows back and forth can't be done out of the box in DWM. In ST, this is ST here. These ones here are actually termite. But ST is what I use for my scratch pads. In ST, you can't actually scroll up. You can't do that without patching it. You can't copy and paste without patching it. You can't, you can zoom in, but it's a weird, weird key binding that's like control page up, control shift page up. It's weird. And you can't change that binding without patching it as far as I know. I haven't actually tried. I don't use, I only experience using ST. So if we do this here, ST, this is ST, right? So I tried to use it. And the things that I just didn't feel like patching it. So I went through weeks and weeks of patching DWM and I enjoyed the process to a point. But I realized that I didn't want to do it again for ST. Not when termite is so good. Or alacrity or kitty or any of those other ones that have all the features that you want built in. There's no reason to use ST unless you want that experience of building it yourself. So I guess my point is, I'm kind of rambling here, that if you're interested in minimalism to an extreme, suckless is great. Otherwise, if you're more interested in functionality, suckless is kind of bad because you might, in order to make it usable, you have to make it not suckless. You know what I mean? You have to go through and add lines and lines and lines of code that kind of defeat the purpose of the suckless philosophy. So I guess I should say, if you don't know, the suckless philosophy basically means that the fewer lines of code in a program the better. It literally does one thing. It takes the unix philosophy to the absolute extreme. And that's good. It's a good idea. But I think like everybody who kind of practices the art of minimalism, you come to realize that you miss out on so many things that are not only useful, but convenient and necessary even to a good experience on your Linux desktop. So if we look at suckless.org, and we go to the DWM page here and the patches. Let me just zoom in here a little bit so you can see the, I mean, there's just dozens and dozens of patches here. And you can't install, first of all, let's get this out of the way. You can't and want to install all these because some of these are duplicate functionalities. Either they do things certain different ways or coded a little bit differently, whatever. But the absolute most patches you probably can do is probably 10. I've talked to a few DWM users. I don't know anybody who has more than 10. It's possible that you could see somebody who has 15. But they're not going to go over that. Because once you get to the certain point, you have to almost certainly start patching things yourself manually without using not built in patch manager. But also, it gets it makes you feel like what's the point, you know, the more patches you add on, why not just use something like X moment, which has all the features built in, or use something like Q tile, which has all the features built in, or use something like I three, which has all the features built in, I mean, you get the point. That's after two months of using DWM, my thought is, why didn't I just use something different? Because I went through and made it so that it's so far away from the suckless philosophy that I might as well just use something else that had all the features built in and I have to go through and, you know, learn how to patch and suffer through all the errors and compile errors and everything that I've had to suffer through over the last two months, even though as the nerd inside me has enjoyed solving those problems and learning the new things from a productive standpoint, DWM has kind of become a time sink for me. Because, you know, or at least it was, you know, until I kind of perfected the setup that I have, you know, I spent so much time tweaking patches, adding patches and, you know, learning how to solve it when a patch didn't, you know, succeed and go through and, you know, manually, therefore, manually having to go through and put in the new code of the patches that I'm trying to use and the proper places and the right files and it was a big pain and a big time waster when I could have just used something else. So the question becomes, why would you use something like DWM or any suckless software? And the answer I've come down to is that you don't use suckless software because you agree with the philosophy. At least I don't think you I mean, maybe some people do. I think people mostly the people who use DWM actually are people who are interested in learning new ways of doing things. They're tweakers. So they go through and they love to twiddle on Linux and get in their hands dirty in the code and stuff. Those, you know, people like me get in the terminal and get into config.h and mess around with stuff and patch things left and right and stuff. You don't use DWM if you're not interested in doing something like that. That's the big takeaway I've come to is that suckless software, specifically DWM and ST are for people who are interested in doing a lot of work, basically, that people are interested in having the experience of building something yourself, which is great. That's the same reason why people use Gentoo, right? Gentoo doesn't give you any real benefits over something like Arch. It just is more work. It makes you feel like you have more control sure, but it's not necessarily the control that you need because you can build your own packages in Arch or Ubuntu. You could you can use, I mean, make works in all the distros. So I mean, compiling your own kernel and your own software packages isn't necessarily something that you can only do on Gentoo. It's just that Gentoo forces you to do those things. So you get the experience and you feel like you've, you know, done something at the end of the day. And that's what I get from suckless is that it's the journey of getting the software the way you want it. That is the whole point of it. So it was just a rambly bit video. The question, the last thing I will leave you on, the last, you know, statement, I guess I will make is, or the question I'll ask myself, I guess it is, uh, am I going to stay with DWM? And I think the answer to that question is yes for now. Now, if you know me at all, you'll know that I like to switch things around. I'm, my ADD is legendary to say the least. I like to switch, you know, change things and shop distros and, you know, all those kinds of things. As soon as I get something like Xmonad actually working, I'll probably switch over to that. You know, just because I've done DWM, I've went through, I've learned all the things that I need to learn. I've riced it to the way I want it to be riced. Now I'm ready to go rice something else. So that's, that's just me. If I were the kind of person who just wanted something that would work and be stable and, you know, just be there and not have to actually tweak it at all. I probably just stick on DWM because I've already done the work. All right. So that is it for this video. If you like this little rambly type stuff, give us a subscribe. We publish videos seven days a week, most of the time, every once in a while, take a day off. I also, we also do a podcast every Sunday-ish to Tuesday-ish. Sometimes those days kind of switch around, but we do it once a week. So give us a subscribe. We really do appreciate it. 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