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, study, modify, and share copies of software. Software which meets these requirements, ...

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 the post-war era in western art. The movement is often interpreted as a reaction to abstract expressionism and modernism; it anticipated contemporary post-mi ...

, 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 interna ...

and

wmii In computing, a tiling window manager is a window manager with the organization of the screen often dependant on mathematical formulas to organise the windows into a non-overlapping frame. This is opposed to the more common approach used by stac ...

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 Minimalism (computing), minimalist, Modularity (programming), modular software development. It is based on the experience of leading devel ...

of "doing one thing and doing it well". 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 a 1989 essay to describe the dynamics of software acceptance. It refers to the argument that software quality does not necessarily increase w ...

" principle and adheres to the

KISS principle KISS, an acronym for "Keep it simple, stupid!", is a design principle first noted by the U.S. Navy in 1960. First seen partly in American English by at least 1938, KISS implies that simplicity should be a design goal. The phrase has been associate ...

("Keep it simple, stupid").

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 Moore's law is the observation that the Transistor count, number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and Forecasting, projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of ...

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

hat A hat is a Headgear, 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 incorpor ...

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 primarily of free and open-source software. Developed by the British company Canonical (company), Canonical and a community of contributors under a Meritocracy, meritocratic gover ...

" 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.

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 internally ...

– keyboard-driven menu utility * ii – IRC client * sbase – UNIX core utilities * surf – web browser *

– 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 that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

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 Minimalism