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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.
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.
Notable suckless promoters on mainstream social media include Luke Smith, DistroTube and Mental Outlaw.
{ 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
- Being free software.
- Extreme minimalism and minimizing dependencies, elimination of any bullshit and bloat.
- 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.
- Forking by default, software is distributed in source format, 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.
- Permissive licensing such as MIT, CC0 etc.
- Typical upper limit for lines of code of a program being 10k, mostly just about 1-2k.
- Focus on the technology itself without mixing it with politics and other bullshit such as COCs.
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, Uriel, has killed himself and became a meme.
Projects
Notable projects developed by the suckless group include:
However there are many more, check out their website.