Founder Anselm R. Garbe Focus Free software | Type Community | |
Founded 2002; 15 years ago (2002) Products dwm, st, surf, and other tools Slogan Software that sucks less | ||
suckless.org is a community of programmers working on minimalist free software projects with a focus on simplicity, clarity, and frugality. The group developed dwm and wmii window managers, surf, tabbed, and other programs that adhere strictly to the UNIX philosophy of "doing one thing and doing it well."
Contents
History
The suckless community was founded by Anselm R. Garbe from Germany in 2002. He became a vocal proponent of the suckless philosophy, saying that "a lot [of what] went wrong in the IT industry recently [...] be recognised 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 [that] 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 he writes.
In 2007, Garbe called for the need for a "Plan 9 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 New Jersey style of "Worse is better" and adheres to the KISS principle ("Keep it simple, stupid").