Squeak was the open-source smalltalk, but got bogged down by the accumulated baggage of unfinished projects stuck inside it. Etoys, an aging morphic implementation, etc.
Squeak was forked in two separate directions:
One was Cuis, which went the "simple-is-better" route, and went on an aggressive cull against complexity. They stripped out as much as they could, and modularised what they could.
The result is a much smaller "smalltalk", and yes, more in line with the feel of the original smalltalk-80.
Pharo also forked from squeak at about the same time. Their goals were "get rid of some of the squeak baggage, and add newer stuff. So in that sense, its in many ways more complex than squeak (and much more complex than cuis).
BUT, they are all essentially forks from squeak. They use essentially the same VM underneath. There are LOTS of squeak classes in the standard classes of both cuis and pharo.
In many ways, squeak, pharo and cuis are really 3 different distributions of squeak, as opposed to 3 different languages.
I think the following is the more realistic comparison:
- squeak = debian stable
- pharo = arch linux (or gentoo)
- cuis = alpine linux
But, they're all linux, and neither one is "more" linux than the other.
Didn't Cuis[1] branch off from Squeak even before that to be closer to its ST-80 roots. Although, if I recall correctly, it does at least use Morphic and not MVC.
The focus of Cuis is simplicity, not tradition. So it is only closer to ST80 than Squeak in the cases where new features make Squeak "fat", like Etoys.
Squeak is the real Smalltalk for modern computers if one wants to be precise.