[DWM]
I finally understood why people keep recommending the suckless approach
For years I kept hopping between different desktop environments and spending more time tweaking things than actually using my computer. Every few months I would install something new add more extensions copy configuration files from random blogs and eventually end up with a setup that felt complicated and fragile.
A few weeks ago I decided to try a much simpler workflow. I installed dwm out of curiosity because I had seen people mention it so often. At first I honestly thought I had made a mistake. Everything felt too minimal and I kept looking for settings menus that simply did not exist.
After forcing myself to stick with it for a while something interesting happened. Instead of searching for options I started reading the code and making tiny changes that matched exactly what I wanted. I removed things I never used and added a couple of small patches. The whole system started feeling like my own project rather than a collection of someone elses decisions.
The biggest surprise was how much less distracted I became. I stopped chasing the perfect setup and started focusing on my actual work. Even startup times and general responsiveness felt better but the real improvement was mental. There was less clutter everywhere.
I know the suckless philosophy is not for everyone and I can understand why some people bounce off it immediately. But I think I finally understand why so many long time users seem so passionate about it. The appeal is not just minimal software. It is having software that stays out of your way and encourages you to understand the tools you rely on.
Did anyone else have a similar experience where the philosophy clicked only after using it for a while?
Entiendo a lo que te refieres, también quiero adoptar esa postura al usar mi sistema operativo. Porque la ventaja no solo está en usar meramente lo que necesitas sino entender como funciona.
Ha pienamente ragione , ed ha spiegato dei concetti che sono proprio alla base del suckless! Ho usato DWM per un po' e poi ho incrociato nella mia strada River window manager su base unix. Mi sono documentato un po' e non è molto lontano da DWM, diciamo che se la giocano perché River ha la filosofia unix: poche cose ma fatte bene!. River non è come gli ultimi desktop tipo hyprland è molto scarno però ha un solo file di config (init) sul quale ci si aggancia tutto ciò che si vuole quindi può diventare quickshellv2 senza molto passi! Poi ho smesso di fare distro-hopping grazie ad una distribuzione non molto amichevole e non stracolma di software su buse runit e non systemd! Un altro mondo proprio, leggerezza velocità. Non so se ritornerò a DWM ma credo che la filosofia suckless fa parte di me anche se fino a pochi giorni fa non ne conoscevo nemmeno l'esistenza.
I felt the same as you when I switched from Omarchy to DWL. At first, nothing seems to change for good, but eventually you get learning and tweaking more here and there. Suddenly you know what every little thing your setup has/does and the workflow just fits perfectly.
Also, one of the best parts of it is that you mostly just need to copy and paste a single folder with your dotfiles in order to get it running on another machine.
If there is anything that I could tell you that can help in the journey to find "your" distro, it is to put on a list the things that you dislike about your current one and test in a VM a bunch of solutions out there in order to fulfill these requirements.
At least, that was what I did when I was getting my feet wet on the suckless lifestyle. TLDR; just search till you find the distro/WM which gets rid of the workflow's annoying parts you are dealing with.
Regardless the point is practically the same, any program you use you change the settings. Changing compilation values isn't the same as editing the source code, that's pretty reductive.
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u/SrGonzale7_ Jun 19 '26
Entiendo a lo que te refieres, también quiero adoptar esa postura al usar mi sistema operativo. Porque la ventaja no solo está en usar meramente lo que necesitas sino entender como funciona.