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Comment by jdub | Hacker News Reader

As much as possible, I try to use software created by kind communities. The behaviours and attitudes in the "suckless" world come across as combative, exclusive, and unpleasant.

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In what way are they combative or unpleasant? I've never experienced this. I enjoy the philosophy and opinionated approach they have to development. I setup an old thinkpad with openbsd and dwm and st and it all worked great and i learned some C along the way. I also used sent - their plaintext slide presentation tool to give a talk at work and it was a pretty cool way to put a presentation together quickly and focus on ideas. Anyway - I like their software and the opnionatedness makes it kinda fun to explore.

Start with the name. That puts it in opposition immediately. They present a lot of that opposition to projects and people, rarely stated kindly.

They could express a positive enthusiasm for simplicity, but that's not the way they go about it.

>Start with the name. That puts it in opposition immediately

The name that immediately claims that their software sucks? I get where you are coming from, but you're just labeling the average software with a different term.

It very very clearly implies that other software sucks and theirs sucks less. If there would be any ambiguity in this they explicitly bash genetic "other hackers" all throughout their philosophy page. It's not exactly subtle.

And most other software implies their software is better than others. Why is calling it "less bad" somehow worse?

Oh no, you said the secret words! https://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

Accusations of "elitism" being what they may, the name is in fact a slice of humility: they advertise that their software "sucks less", not that it is "without suck".

This isn't an accusation. They explicitly mention this is as a design goal on their page. See the "Differences" section: https://dwm.suckless.org/

I always found the elitist statement on that page strangely at odds with the rest of the philosophy (at least how I understand it).

I mean, if everything is small and simple, doesn’t require you to learn a frameworkish configuration written in yet another language but can be configured with what amounts to a key/value file and can be installed in seconds with make + sudo make install, then it’s hardly elitist.

I guess the name comes from Mutt:

> The Mutt E-Mail Client

> "All mail clients suck. This one just sucks less." -me, circa 1995

The above is in essence a absurdly humorous, self-derogatory show of humility, summarizing the sysiphean task of trying to make any software bug free and useful in any way.

That's not the way I understand the "-less" composition they use. "harmless" doesn't mean "poses less harm", it means "poses no harm". "colorless" doesn't mean "less color", it means "no color". And so on. So to me, "suckless" means "doesn't suck", no humility. Admittedly, it doesn't exactly follow the normal composition rules so the exact interpretation is more up in the air, but that won't change the fact that many people will read it the way I described above.

I think it means both. The ideal is to be suckless, but practically, the most one can hope for is to suck less.

Well in this case, "software that sucks less" is on the top of every page of their website, so the intent behind their name is pretty clear.

Anslem of suckless explains in a conference video that it was basically the domain name they ended up with that got traction though not everybody liked it to begin with. Which kindof sucks in itself but you know..

Well if you read their philosophy page it's half about how they want to write cool software focusing on advanced users, and half about how everyone else is a misguided idiot with wrong ideas... I mean it's kind of in the name. I always took suckless to imply that everything else sucks more.

There was a tweet about Nazi stuff:

https://twitter.com/pid_eins/status/1113738764797534208?s=19