Man, I feel weird. I used BS2 temporarily, but then stripped it out for a straight reset and grid system. Old habits die hard, I guess, and what I Want from a UI doesn't always match Bootstraps ideas... I'll give this another shot for my startup prototype, but I have a feeling the same will happen.
Is anyone else like that, or am I now old-school at the ripe age of 22?
If you're just using it for the minimal things, then you might look at the highly underrated Skeleton (http://getskeleton.com). It's got a reset, grid, forms and typography, but all are fairly minimalist, easy to override, etc.
I'd recommend Foundation as an alternative too, but that one's already been suggested. It's also very good, but slightly heavier-weight than Skeleton.
Fine question. It still works perfectly either way. As it stands, its minimalism doesn't need a whole lot of maintenance, but it may not be actively maintained any more.
I have no use for it myself. If I need a simple Bootstrap design, I can just copy some of the elements in plain old CSS and have a much simpler setup. If I need something complicated, Bootstrap is limiting - you end up rewriting it all anyhow.
And the idea of keeping up with Bootstrap versions is just plain crazy to me.
I checked it out for that reason. Then I found a number of social images and began wondering why a lightweight CSS framework needed images for facebook, twitter, etc...
If you want something lightweight, I wouldn't go for Foundation either. Even after stripping out the unnecessary stuff, I found it overly obnoxious to style.
I ended up with the Skeleton framework after struggling with both Bootstrap and Foundation for a few days. It was a much better decision. I've also been eyeing Bourbon Neat lately as well.
Which reset and grid system do you use? I have the same experience, and I end up un-checking every option except one or two on bootstrap's customization page for most of my projects.
I used it at my startup, but there's absolutely no reason for me to upgrade to BS3. I think bootstrap is great for giving people a quick framework to build off of, when writing up a grid system doesn't make sense. For our next major release, I think we're going to migrate away from BS entirely. I'd rather control it all in house than play catchup with their releases. For me, it's not even the UI but the ability to control exactly what we're doing.
I agree that it can bloat, and often customizing components takes as long as simply starting from scratch. However, I really like LESS, and bootstrap is full of some great less utilities. Customizing bootstraps less is a perfect example of why I love it, and how it saves me time
At the ripe age of 22, you'll like undergo a number of pivots in your career between embracing frameworks and tossing them out. There is no right answer; sometimes they help, and sometimes they hurt. We can't always predict what the right level of abstraction will be for future problems; today's popular frameworks can either become tomorrow's cruft-laden disasters or its stone-age embarrassments. Likewise, the definition of minimalist changes with the times (see jQuery), and minimalism itself goes into and out of fashion.
I happen to like Bootstrap, because I've seen a lot of projects descend into mess and cruft due to poor maintenance; it takes effort to maintain clean conventions, and if a framework dictates those conventions to me, that's one less set of decisions that I and my team have to make. But Bootstrap feels undeniably heavy, and perhaps I'll regret its use later. But for now it makes me faster, and I choose it knowing I'm making a tradeoff.
Is anyone else like that, or am I now old-school at the ripe age of 22?