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Projects like this are good for everyone even those who don't want to get their hands dirty. That's because these projects will influence and contribute to other projects that you likely care more about.

This is the same logic behind OpenBSD. You don't need to run OpenBSD to benefit from the security posture and fixes that they provide. Consider your life without ssh.

Probably a good reason to consider contributing to these projects.




I'd rather suckless didn't influence anything I care about.

It's fine that it exists for those who want it, I'd rather systemd and all my GUI apps and DEs stay as they are.

Android could use a bit more modularity though, but the SAF makes that a challenge at times.


That's a respectable approach. I feel the same about dbus and systemd - fine that they exist for some, but I'd rather see them not stretch tentacles into libresolv, ntpd, udev, firefox, wtmp/utmp, etc...


It's never been suckless' goal to influence anything. They're advanced tools explicitly written for advanced users. Nothing more, nothing less.


> Consider your life without ssh.

That's actually an interesting example. ssh was made to fix a real problem (password sniffing). What problem is being fixed here?


The problem being addressed is the Moore's Law equivalent of the Hedonic Treadmill.

Some of us don't want EVERY available byte of RAM or clock cycle occupied by bloated window managers, terminals, browsers, init systems, text editors, etc.

Suckless has a lot in common with the Handmade Network's philosophy. Keep it small, keep it simple, stop throwing a billion layers of abstraction on top of each other, give a shit about cache lines, heap fragmentation, pipeline flushes, etc.

We are mired in the Jevon's Paradox of the computing world right now. The faster hardware becomes, the more obese our software becomes to utilize it. And as a consequences, much worse.

Suckless aims to address this.


> Consider your life without ssh.

IPsec and Telnet. Might not have been so bad, if IPsec wasn't such a chore; particularly compared to the ease of getting an sshd up off the ground.


homie ipsec is a trashfire, you couldn't pay me enough to go back to that shit.




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