dwm is nice. I enjoyed using it for a while.

I'll assume dwm is great and all, but I feel like that just proves my point.

musl itself, busybox let’s you have a full unix set of tools for 700kb, which is awesome for embedded Linux. There’s also dropbear, and ssh/sshd implementation in about 110kb binary. So when talking about bloat in embedded, it something very measurable when the option is a 32MB NOR flash chip for the root file system

You're right, but that's kind of the point of suckless. To them, we should all be using software that is small, self-contained, and simple in implementation; both GCC and Clang are too complex in that case. C++ itself sucks to them, so g++ and clang++ don't need alternatives anyway.

Sometimes, it would mean separating what one piece of software does into many in order to replicate what that one complex thing does.

I don't subscribe to their philosophy, by the way. "Good" software which is elegant and easy to use is often very complex in implementation. That philosophy is basically the "worse is better" philosophy: https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

To play the devils advocate here, aren't they basically proving you only need trivial software to get by?

> you only need trivial software to get by

I'd like to see the smug suckles crowd write anything resembling a modern 3D video game today, from scratch, using OpenGL (oh, because Vulkan is 'bloat'—extremely ironic take, given Vulkan is closer to the metal than OGL), C, and their various collections of UNIXisms.

> I'd like to see the smug suckless crowd write anything resembling a modern 3D multiplayer video game today

And they wouldn't. That's the point. I don't think it's a matter of "just don't play games" either. Games don't have to look like <insert pretty "modern" game here> in order to be fun. Look at Battlebit for a recent example of this. It's not a minimalist game, but it surely ain't maximalist.

> Use what works, use what is practical, use what is easy, use what is reasonably efficient and fast without being extremely complex.

All of these are either subjective or based on personal needs. I agree, you should use what works for you. As should the people who like minimalist software.

I don't know why you think we would take OpenGL over Vulkan, the former is orders of magnitude worse than the latter in every respect except for hardware compatibility. I work in games, specifically doing engine development. For some metrics, our last game has sold ~400k copies on Steam + GOG over its 7 year lifetime. I am the only programmer currently in a codebase that has some hundreds of thousands of lines of highly idiosyncratic C++ code that uses OpenGL. I also am our only form of tech support with any ability to actually fix technical issues. "without being extremely complex" what an absurd statement.

I use the technology stack I do as a means to an end, and that end is not because I couldn't make a computer do something without the tower of shit I've got living on my desk. It's because I have to make money to live, and that means selling software to other people, so it should probably run on their computers. Most of the thinking that goes into my job isn't mathematics or theory. It's wrangling the absolute clusterfuck of a technology stack that consumers buy up by the millions and trying to hammer some kind of reason into it, ensuring that all the hundreds of moving parts of this massively complicated product run well on not just the computers of spoiled first worlders who think a 2060 is "low end", but on the tens of thousands of computers that run our games which are around 10 years old.

I would much rather live in an ivory tower and do everything from scratch and not have to think about making sure Ivan from Vladivostok isn't going to be shitting up the Steam forum because MSVC decided /O2 means "please reinterpret this code to run 10x slower than it did in your last minor version senpai" or the dozens of esoteric GPU issues I've had to solve over the years. Please. I would much rather be hand-rolling 3D rotation matrices than this shit.

On the same boat as you.

UNIX was cool for a while, being stuck in the past, trying to pretend modern computing is all about reviving the experience of using UNIX V6, alongside twm, not so much.

The game development example is quite good one, as to this day, most people on those communities don't really grasp the demoscene and game development culture.

I used Siemens NX daily and Mathematica at home. While such programs are certainly “bloated” they work well and provide an incredible amount of value. The communities around musl/suckless/cat-v have absolutely no answer to how they could possibly replicate such programs in their paradigm.