It's not just the toxic community. It's also the fact that their opinion of what "sucks less" is quite particular and not shared by many people.
Instead of acknowledging that they're engaged in an interesting, unusual, and important experiment, they just say that everything else sucks. The whole premise of the existence of the group is more or less that most software is written by and for inept rubes.
On the other hand, maybe their exclusionary attitude is what helps keep the interesting, unusual, and important experiment alive. I know a lot of people who really enjoy using dwm, st, dmenu, surf, etc. They are indeed good, non-sucky programs, if you don't mind writing some light-duty C code and recompiling to update your config. Who am I to judge? But you have to acknowledge that this is a very unusual definition of "sucking less".
The premise of their project is something I fully agree with,
but I always found it a bit too extreme and opinionated. It's
one thing to avoid unnecessary bloat. But going for short code
at any cost doesn't seem to be the ideal solution either; now
we've got over 100 patches for dwm, created based on the
untouched source code of some specific dwm version. The result
is a bit of a mess, only worsened by the source code containing
almost exclusively 1-2 letter variable names.
Nonetheless I like most suckless projects, especially st and
dmenu are fantastic. Even though the push against bloat is more
needed on the internet. I'm tired of all the tracking, loading
times and memory usage, despite ad blockers.
Instead of acknowledging that they're engaged in an interesting, unusual, and important experiment, they just say that everything else sucks. The whole premise of the existence of the group is more or less that most software is written by and for inept rubes.
On the other hand, maybe their exclusionary attitude is what helps keep the interesting, unusual, and important experiment alive. I know a lot of people who really enjoy using dwm, st, dmenu, surf, etc. They are indeed good, non-sucky programs, if you don't mind writing some light-duty C code and recompiling to update your config. Who am I to judge? But you have to acknowledge that this is a very unusual definition of "sucking less".