You're clearly not their target audience if those are your takeaways. But there are lots of people out there who do prefer to recompile instead of configure and find suckless feature sets to be inline with their own requirements. To say that a product "sucks" because they don't cater specifically to your arbitrary desires is grossly unfair.
First of all it is "suck less" not "suckless". ie "less bloat/features" rather than "hey look at our perfect software". This is a point reiterated on their site repeatedly (including the <title> tag on their home page: http://suckless.org/)
Secondly, it's all very tongue in cheek. After all it's aimed at the OpenBSD crowd and like minded people. It's not really meant to be taken literally by the general computing audience - not even within the wider FOSS community.
Lastly it's sad day for HN when negative comments get up-voted and positive comments defending niche software get down-voted. What happened to respecting our peers and acknowledging the massively wide range of personal preferences and usage habits?
> What happened to respecting our peers and acknowledging the massively wide range of personal preferences and usage habits?
I absolutely wasn't trying to be disparaging of them. I understand that there are people who love their work, and I love some of their software (dmenu).
My point was more toward the parent I was replying to - i.e., that the message from the suck-less crowd that other pieces of software "suck" is just an opinion. In the same way that they think (for example) the KDE desktop sucks, it's allowed to think that their products suck.
But I suppose that it can be seen as disrespectful, and I understand that. There is definitely room for airing one's opinion in a less inflammatory way.
> To say that a product "sucks" because they don't cater specifically to your arbitrary desires is grossly unfair.
Then again, if they name their project(s) "suck less", it's completely fair to say it sucks. If they can have arbitrary standards about what constitutes suckage, why not us?
