Ron via Talk said on Wed, 20 May 2026 16:13:45 -0700
There's an undercurrent of "it should be hard to keep the riff-raff out" mentality that's just bonkers.
That is NOT the undercurrent, and it has nothing to do with riff-raff. What it has to do with is the destruction of DIY, via hypercomplexification, to attract people who probably won't use Linux anyway, and if they tried, are unwilling to edit a file or use Google. A great analogy is automobile air-bags. Air bags are dangerous and injure people in 20MPH collisions because the powers that be specified putting in so much explosive as to protect a person not wearing a seat belt. It's the deliberate detriment of responsible folks to accommodate those who don't want to bother at all.
We'll always have small clusters of people who are in favour of being exclusionist
Well, that's one way of putting it. Another way of putting it the wonderful neighborhood analogy. Small clusters of skilled people create a wonderful neighborhood that's an affordable alternative to the strip mall sprawl, word gets out, the neighborhood becomes hip, strip mall big money comes in strip malling the neighborhood at huge rent increases, and the folks who built it become curiosities and are called "elitist", just before they leave for some place less plastic (poser, whatever you want to call it). - people who think hard-to-use Linux is good. You mean like those championing Gnome3? Or modern Gimp? [snip]
I want Linux to be welcoming,
Linux has always been welcoming.
and I don't want to spend hours of my time recompiling.
[slitt@mydesk st-0.9.3]$ cat jj make clean make tic -sx st.info ./st [slitt@mydesk st-0.9.3]$ time ./jj rm -f st st.o x.o st-0.9.3.tar.gz c99 -I/usr/X11R6/include `pkg-config --cflags fontconfig` `pkg-config --cflags freetype2` -DVERSION=\"0.9.3\" -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600 -O1 -c st.c c99 -I/usr/X11R6/include `pkg-config --cflags fontconfig` `pkg-config --cflags freetype2` -DVERSION=\"0.9.3\" -D_XOPEN_SOURCE=600 -O1 -c x.c c99 -o st st.o x.o -L/usr/X11R6/lib -lm -lrt -lX11 -lutil -lXft `pkg-config --libs fontconfig` `pkg-config --libs freetype2` 7 entries written to /home/slitt/.terminfo could not allocate color 'brightyellow' real 0m0.732s user 0m0.610s sys 0m0.118s [slitt@mydesk st-0.9.3]$ By the way, the "brightyellow" error was my mistake, not st's. Deleting one line fixes it.
I can't elaborate further, this hits the nail on the head perfectly.
Yep. With Suckless Tools 1 second compiles, you're just compiling your life away. No doubt about it. I'd much prefer a 4 deep 4 wide dependency tree with different versions differently timed with massive attack surfaces and numerous entry points for supply chain exploits! By the way, as I said earlier in the thread, I personally write my software using config files. But I'm certainly not going to ignore the robust simplicity advantages of Suckless Tools just because their config is sometimes in a .h file that's easy to change and recompiles in a second. SteveT Steve Litt http://444domains.com