suckless.org is a

free software community The free software movement is a social movement with the goal of obtaining and guaranteeing certain freedoms for software users, namely the freedoms to run the software, to study the software, to modify the software, and to share copies of the s ...

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 dwm is a minimalist dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed by Suckless that has influenced the development of several other X window managers, including xmonad and awesome. It is externally similar to wmii, but internally mu ...

and

wmii In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with an organization of the screen into mutually non-overlapping frames, as opposed to the more common approach (used by stacking window managers) of coordinate-based stacking of overlap ...

window managers, surf tabbed, and other programs that are said to adhere strictly to the

Unix philosophy The Unix philosophy, originated by Ken Thompson, is a set of cultural norms and philosophical approaches to minimalist, modular software development. It is based on the experience of leading developers of the Unix operating system. Early Unix de ...

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 whatwent 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 stops being a valid assumption." The suckless manifesto deplores the common tendency for "complex, error-prone and slow software

hat A hat is a head covering which is worn for various reasons, including protection against weather conditions, ceremonial reasons such as university graduation, religious reasons, safety, or as a fashion accessory. Hats which incorporate mecha ...

seems 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 lover's and C hacker

Ubuntu Ubuntu ( ) is a Linux distribution based on Debian and composed mostly of free and open-source software. Ubuntu is officially released in three editions: '' Desktop'', ''Server'', and ''Core'' for Internet of things devices and robots. All ...

" 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 Worse is better (also called the New Jersey style) is a term conceived by Richard P. Gabriel in an essay of the same name to describe the dynamics of software acceptance. It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increa ...

" principle and adheres to the

KISS principle KISS, an acronym for "Keep it simple, stupid!", is a design principle noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960. First seen partly in American English by at least 1938, the KISS principle states that most systems work best if they are kept simple rather tha ...

("Keep it simple, stupid").

Projects

– window manager *

dmenu dwm is a minimalist dynamic window manager for the X Window System developed by Suckless that has influenced the development of several other X window managers, including xmonad and awesome. It is externally similar to wmii, but internall ...

– 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 *

– window manager * st - lightweight, 256 colour-enabled (with 24-bit colour support) terminal emulator * stali - static Linux distribution

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