suckless.org is a
free software community of programmers working on projects with a focus on
minimalism
In visual arts, music and other media, minimalism is an art movement that began in post–World War II in Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Don ...
, simplicity, clarity, and frugality. The group developed the
dwm and
wmii window managers,
surf tabbed, and other programs that are said to adhere strictly to the
Unix philosophy of "doing one thing and doing it well".
History
The suckless community was founded by Anselm R. Garbe in 2006.
He became a vocal proponent of the suckless philosophy, saying that "a lot
f what
F, or f, is the sixth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''ef'' (pronounced ), and the plural is ''efs''.
Hist ...
went wrong in the IT industry recently
..be recognized in order to rethink the common practice, and perhaps to think about the time when
Moore's law
Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empir ...
stops being a valid assumption." The suckless manifesto deplores the common tendency for "complex, error-prone and slow software
hatseems to be prevalent in the present-day software industry", and argues that a programmer's performance should not be measured by the number of lines of code they write.
In October 2006, Garbe registered the domain ''suckless.org'' to replace ''10kloc.org'' and ''wmii.de''.
In 2007, Garbe called for the need for a "
Plan 9 Plan 9 or Plan Nine may refer to:
Music
* Plan 9 (band), a psychedelic rock band from Rhode Island
* ''Plan 9'', an album by Big Guitars From Memphis with Rick Lindy
* "Plan 9", a song on the 1993 album ''Gorgeous'' by electronica band 808 Stat ...
lover's and C hacker
Ubuntu" which comes packed with dwm/wmii and all necessary tools for developing C code and suggested calling it ''9ubuntu''. Suckless later developed ''stali'' (static Linux), an operating system with statically linked executables that adheres to the suckless principles.
The development team follows the "
Worse is better" principle and adheres to the
KISS principle ("Keep it simple, stupid").
Projects
*
dwm – window manager
*
dmenu – keyboard-driven menu utility
*
ii – IRC client
*
sbase
sbase is a set of programs developed by suckless.org that implements several portable UNIX tools in a minimal way according to POSIX specifications. It is used in Google's Fuchsia
''Fuchsia'' () is a genus of flowering plants that consists ...
- UNIX core utilities
*
surf – web browser
*
wmii – window manager
* st - lightweight, 256 colour-enabled (with 24-bit colour support) terminal emulator
* stali - static
Linux distribution
A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...
Conferences
Starting in 2013 the suckless.org community organizes annual conferences and hackathon gatherings focusing on technical topics and socializing with community members, commonly referred to as "SLCon" (short for "SuckLess Conference").
suckless.org e.V.
In 2015 the legal entity suckless.org e.V. was founded during the suckless conference.
Its aim and main purpose is supporting the projects of suckless.org and open source in general.
References
External links
{{official website
Free software projects