Why I Love Suckless Software and Why I'm Going Back to Omarchy

I had my adventure with Suckless software on a bare Arch install. In fact, I'm keeping it on my laptop. It's a little older, and running dwm, dmenu, and st on it, gives me a very comfortable-feeling UI, without taking many resources. So I get to run my old laptop for a few more years before I retire it ...which means reducing e-waste.

Once I had worked out all the builds on my laptop and felt comfortable that my builds were solid, I decided to blast and reinstall my desktop. I figured I could get a reinstall down to about an hour. From blank machine to usable dev machine in an hour.

And I LOVED the way all my builds worked on my laptop, so it seemed like a no-brainer to replace my Omarchy desktop with my Suckless builds.

What's so great about something called 'Suckless'?

Suckless just ...gets me

It gets right to the heart of the Unix philosophy of doing one thing and doing it well. I've often wondered if any software anymore gets to a point where it doesn't need any more features. Like: It's stable. People are using it and liking it. That's good.

It's Mine (Mine!)

I also love the fact that I own it. It's mine. I think Framework Computers (my next laptop, btw) once had on their site: This is my PC. There are many like it, but this one is mine. I love the callback to Kubrick and the Rifleman's Creed. Plus, I LOVE the fact that I can build my desktop the way I want it and no one can stop me. (Channeling my inner Veruca Salt)

If you love it so much, why are you going back to Omarchy?

Because it's exhausting. I like to tinker, but when the answer is always "recompile the code"? No. To change the font size? No. The upside is that you only have to do it once. Check it into source control and the next time you need to install a machine, you can get it set up in an hour. Right?

While I've gotten close with Arch and the Suckless stack, I always end up spending a few hours setting things up. This patch doesn't work anymore; gotta find another patch to round the corners on my windows. Because I'm a child. I have to be able to see the cool colors and rounded corners. The futuristic spaceship cockpit vibe. But this is recompiling your terminal so you can bump the font size up and down.

It does NOT play well with my ADHD. Too many little "side quests" to go on. While I still did get back to a fully working system with my own builds of the Suckless stuff, nvim, tmux, GNU Stow, and my dotfiles, it took me way too long. (Maybe 4 hours?) A lot of it was weird hardware bugs, or little libraries I forgot to install and then had to go back and re-install something so it could build with that library installed. And so on, and so on, and so on.

Omarchy took me just about an hour to get it installed, configure it with all my tools, and to remove the extra stuff I don't want. You can even uninstall EVERYTHING that DHH puts on top of a decent Arch/Wayland/hyprland system. But I find his defaults to be about 80% perfect for my needs. His keybinding changes are sensible and follow what most people commonly do (mapping the leader key for tmux to Ctrl+Space, etc.)

I especially love that I can install all the web applications that I use as "Web Apps", so that I'm focused on that application. It helps to keep me focused in general. I love the theme integration and Omarchy, on the whole, has been getting better and better with every release.

So while there are plenty of side quests you can take, mostly the defaults are good enough for now. I can scroll backwards in my terminal by default. Copy and paste work OOTB. It just works. And the install is essentially one command and takes like five minutes. Maybe ten.

But this is not the end...

My builds will stay on my laptop. Working from home, I don't have much call for it outside of just not wanting to work from my desk or something. I will have to make a conscious effort to use it regularly. It doesn't have to be often ...just regular. So I can experiment. It can be the box I use to try software out. If I get that build from zero to working in under an hour ...I may change my mind again.