I take a practical approach. I use simple programs when
they do the job well, and more complex programs when
they get the job done better. Sometimes a simple program
can be useful for certain jobs, such as ones involving
shell scripting, whereas a complex program may be more
useful for example in other applications, such as using
Solidworks for engineering work. LaTeX is certainly a
bloated monstrosity, but the damn thing is useful for a
lot of different tasks.
People on this email list tend to go to an extreme in
favoring simplicity above all else, which is why they
release dumpster fires like the ST terminal emulator for
example which has absolutely no features at all, is
riddled with bugs and compatibility problems, and
requires extensive patching to add in any useful
features. The developers are also basement-dwelling
losers, total raging assholes who take personal offense
to the suggestion that their code should be better
commented or that someone might fork the code to make an
improved version.
I tried ST for a time before realizing it was trash and
just switched back to Xterm, the gold standard of
functional X11 terminal emulators, which the ST
developers talked shit about, calling "bloated" in their
documentation, and saying the code wasn't good. Actually
it is not bloated, the code quality is much higher than
ST (and is actually commented!), It Just Works(TM), and
it's noticeably faster as well when ST is patched with
the juvenile "scrollback buffer support"
implementation--which calls malloc() once for every
line(!) of the scrollback buffer.
Take anything that a religious cult member says with a
grain of salt.
Dave
Oof, I feel like that's gonna start one hell of a flame war
right now.
About suckless's software. Personally, I've got an
impression that it's not about personal use. Like, you
aren't really expected to install ST as you main and
everyday terminal. These programs are more of a collection
of tools that should be combined and embedded as a
foundation for something bigger.
Firefox will always be better than surf, it just will. But
replacing Firefox is not what surf should strive for. It's
more of a tool for situations when you need an ability to
embed a website and full-blown Firefox or Chrome will be an
overkill.
That said, if there are any compatibility problems _(which
there probably are, since why shouldn't there be any
compatibility problems when your main goal when writing
software is to make it as small as possible)_ than that kind
of ruins the whole purpose of all of this...
--
Nikita
