Why I Want It To Be Suckless

tl;dr

  1. Suckless software does not mean a low system footprint.
  2. Instead, it puts you, the user, on the throne.
  3. Even if you don't have anything to contribute, you should still care.

One may ask why I want my operating system, browser, window manager, terminal, etc. to be minimal, or, to be more precise, why I want my software to be suckless.

The suckless philosophy page already does a good job of describing the current problems as well as the overall goal, but I still want to address a few things that are often misunderstood or brought up as arguments against suckless or minimal software in general.

"We have powerful enough hardware in [current year]."

This argument is often made when talking about minimal software that deliberately leaves out certain features. The idea is that minimal software may have made sense when computers only had 512 MB of RAM, but today's computers have far more resources, so why not make use of them?

On the surface, I agree that we should make use of the resources our systems provide, but there is more to it. First of all, minimal software follows a different goal than software that primarily aims to reduce system resource usage. Alpine Linux is probably a good example of a project that focuses on reducing resource usage but does not follow a minimal or suckless philosophy. Alpine is often used on servers or systems with limited resources, such as embedded devices, where there is still a hard limit to how demanding software can be.

Suckless software thinks of you, the user, and aims to make it your software. By that I mean that you should be able to understand the complete source code, contribute to the project, write your own patches, and so on. Everyone is treated as a potential contributor. This implies that the code has to be concise, free (as in freedom), of high quality, and hackable. Striving for these goals comes with several positive side effects that are often mistaken for the primary goals, even though they are merely consequences:

  1. Being potentially more secure due to the smaller attack surface.
  2. Having relatively low system resource usage.
  3. Being easier to maintain/audit.

But why should I even care about being able to change software to my own liking? Why should I want to contribute to a project within a reasonable amount of time and with reasonable effort? The following quote describes the same idea in a different context, but it can be applied just as well to suckless software.

"Arguing that you don't care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say."

I think that quote says everything there is to say, and I hope you now understand why suckless software is about more than just being minimal.

For transparency: I wrote this post myself and then used ChatGPT to correct grammatical mistakes and improve the overall reading experience, since English is not my first language.