Sucks

This page is a list of software, and just general things that absolutely suck. This page was inspired by the suckless page under the same name and cat-v's list of harmful software.

• The modern web and web engines

The modern web is terrible and bloated. The bloated web leads to bloated browsers, which leads to severe security vulnerabilities and insane hardware requirements. Seriously, there is more complexity in designing a modern web browser engine than designing a desktop operating system. That's insane. More information regarding the state of the modern web. Several replacements for the web exist, but they have all failed to gain a userbase as normies demand the "fancy" and bloated mess we have today.

• libvirt

QEMU is just too complex for most people, and as such someone decided that we needed to develop a XML configured frontend for QEMU called libvirt which is just barely easier to use but barely works and breaks core functionality constantly, notably PCIe passthrough with quite a lot of devices. There is no real replacement, other than just using QEMU by itself, which is possible.

• Flatpak

Because we have so many terrible package managers, someone decided that it would be a better idea to introduce yet another terrible package manager, one that bundles all libraries the program depends on together into one container, wasting the user's storage space with 50 different copies of the same thing. The only valid use for Flatpaks would be server use or maybe a system with musl libc when a program only compiles with glibc. There are many replacements, such as the normal package manager you're already using (I hope).

• AppImage

AppImage is what happens when a Windows developer comes to our operating system, refuses to admit package managers are superior, and instead decides to bring the Windows tradition of downloading executables from the internet and running them to our operating system. AppImage has (thankfully) slowly declined in userbase due to not updating fuse and popular distros dropping the older fuse version. Replacements exist, such as your normal package manager.

• GTK

GTK used to be a good toolkit, but as the years progressed it went from being a customizable, hackable toolkit to a toolkit which only works well with GNOME. One might attempt to make a theme for GTK, but doing so is not at all trivial, and to apply said theme you NEED to use a graphical program. In theory QT would be a replacement, but it suffers from the same problem, only it's designed for KDE rather than GNOME. Most toolkits are just garbage.

• Wayland

Wayland aims to be a less bloated protocol, and while it does do some things better than X11, most of the bloat comes from the X.org implementation of the X11 protocol. While Wayland claims to be less bloated, much of Wayland's bloat is passed on to the compositor, which has to implement all of that. Writing a Wayland compositor from scratch takes a lot of effort, requires implementing a lot of different protocols, compositing, window management and more. A Wayland compositor is pretty much a full Wayland implementation, and more on top of that. For this reason libraries like wlroots exist which write a lot of the boilerplate for you.

Wayland also combines the window manager and compositor, meaning you cannot write a window manager without writing a compositor and vice versa. If a compositor manages windows well, but sucks at compositing then you're SOL. While Wayland objectively provides better security than X11, Wayland clients are also not allowed to place themselves in a specific position of the screen in the name of security. So when you try to use --x-position and --y-position arguments in spmenu and find that they don't do anything, you know who to thank for that.

• speedwm

My dwm fork speedwm is quite bloated, but more importantly it's really slow for some reason. The project is now archived, and you should probably use dwm instead.