6.5 KiB
Suckless
Suckless, software that sucks less, is a type of free software, as well as an organization (http://suckless.org/), that tries to adhere to a high technological minimalism, freedom and hackability, and opposes so called bloat and unnecessary complexity which has been creeping into most "modern" software and by which technology has started to become less useful and more burdening. It is related to Unix philosophy and KISS but brings some new ideas onto the table. LRS builds on top of suckless ideas.
The community is relatively a small niche but has also seen a growth in popularity sometime in 2010s, thanks to tech youtubers such as Luke Smith, Distro Tube and Mental Outlaw. It has also gained traction on 4chan's technology board. While consisting a lot of expert programmers and hackers mostly interested in systems like GNU/Linux, BSDs and Plan 9, a lot of less skilled "Linux" users and even complete non-programmers have started to use suckless to various degrees -- dwm has for example seen a great success among "Unix porn" lovers and chronic ricers. While some members are hardcore minimalists and apply their principles to everything, some just cherry pick programs they find nice and integrate them in their otherwise bloated systems.
Suckless is pretty cool, it has inspired LRS, but watch out, as with most of the few promising things nowadays it is half cool and half shitty -- for example most suckless followers seem to be rightists and capitalists who are motivated by harmful goals such as their own increased productivity, not by altruism. LRS fixes this, we only take the good ideas of suckless.
{ From what it seems to me, the "official" suckless community is largely quiet and closed, leading conversations mostly on mailing lists and focusing almost exclusively on the development of their software without politics, activism and off topics, probably because they consider it bullshit that would only be distracting. There is also suckless subreddit which is similarly mostly focused on the software alone. They let their work speak. Some accuse the community of being Nazis, however I believe this is firstly irrelevant and secondly mostly false accusations of haters, even if we find a few Nazis among them, just as in any community. Most pro-suckless people I've met were actually true socialists (while Nazis are not socialist despite their name). Unlike tranny software, suckless software itself doesn't promote any politics, it is a set of purely functional tools, so the question of the developers' private opinions is unimportant here. Suckless ideas are good regardless of whose brains they came from. ~drummyfish }
Attributes
Notable attributes of suckless software include:
- Being free software with the preference of permissive licenses such as MIT and CC0.
- Extreme minimalism and minimizing dependencies, elimination of any bullshit and bloat. Advocating Unix philosophy, KISS etc.
- Configuration of software is part of its source code (
config.h) and change of this configuration requires recompiling the software (which is extremely easy and fast with suckless software). This removes the need for dealing with config files which requires special libraries, file systems and extra code. - Mainly using two programming languages: C (C89 or C99) for compiled programs and POSIX shell for scripting. Some also use languages such as go or lisp, but they're in minority.
- Forking and compiling by default, software is distributed in source format (no binaries), every user is supposed to create a personal customized fork and compile/customize the software himself.
- Mods (extension/addons) are implemented and distributed as patch files. The idea is to fork the base version of the software and then apply patches to make a unique, completely personalized version of the software.
- Typical upper limit for lines of code of about 10k, mostly just about 1-2k. This makes software easy to understand, modify, fork and maintain.
- Focus on the technology itself without mixing it with politics and other bullshit such as COCs.
- Not aiming for mainstream popularity, being a bit of an elite club, in the good sense -- suckless is for expert users who understand, handle and create non-mainstream technology without handholding. Trying to be normie friendly would just lead to software and community that looks like the mainstream software and its community. { My view on this is that it's not that suckless WANTS to be an elitist club for its own sake; the issue lies in mainstream technology being hostile towards ethical software -- using ethical software nowadays requires one to be very tech savvy, hence it's not suckless who is discriminating but rather those who create mainstream technology. ~drummyfish }
History
Suckless in current form has existed since 2006 when the domain suckless.org was registered by a German guy Anselm R. Garbe who is the founder of the community. It has evolved from a community centered around specific software projects, most notably wmii. Garbe has given interview about suckless in FLOSS Weekly episode 355.
Some time before 2010 suckless developed stali, a statically linked glibc-less "Linux distro" that was based on the idea that dynamic linking is harmful and that static linking is mostly advantageous. It also came with suckless software by default. This project was made independent and split from suckless in 2018 by Garbe.
In 2012 a core veteran member of suckless, a Spanish guy nicknamed Uriel, has killed himself and became a meme.
Projects
Notable projects developed by the suckless group include:
However there are many more (IRC clients, file formats, presentation software, ...), check out their website.