Puppy 4.2 Bling Or No Bling ANNONYMOUS POLL

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ttuuxxx
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Puppy 4.2 Bling Or No Bling ANNONYMOUS POLL

#1 Post by ttuuxxx »

Hi guys, I've been helping out 4.2 a lot. We are about to have a new puppy release in a few weeks or less. There have been some new addons to Puppy, Two in particular, the first one is Pwidgets and I think the boys have done a real nice job of it :) It looks really nice on the desktop :)
The issue that I have with Pwidgets is that
-it can't be uninstalled, just disabled, it uses system resources as soon as you boot up. So you can't permanently disable it if your running live, each time you boot up without a pupsave file, you'll have disable it.
-it slows down compiling,
-it also breaks up icons on your desktop when you have the analog clock running on the desktop,which is default by the way.
-It gives your windows a sluggish feel when moving them around.
-it takes longer for your pc to load.

I personally feel it should come as pet package located in root, with a desktop install shortcut that users could delete both files with 2 click.

Next is the icon switcher, with deep thought 4.2, we have a new icon switcher, it changes not just the desktop icons, but the menu icons and the taskbar icons as well, for this to happen 133 exec files are system linked to /root/my-applications/bin, this slows down the fixmenus script around 2-3 times longer than before. I personally would like to get rid off the crazy 133 system links and have one nice menu theme and keep the original 4 series icon switcher, and have a faster and reliable pc.

well this is just a anonymous poll so feel free to cast your vote. I liked puppy better when it was less complicated, less background systems running, less system links, less resources and less things forced on you in general.

Thanks for reading
have a nice day :)
ttuuxxx

@@@ UPDATE @@@
I made a no bling version :)
http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewto ... 236#289236
Last edited by ttuuxxx on Sun 29 Mar 2009, 06:58, edited 1 time in total.
http://audio.online-convert.com/ <-- excellent site
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/ <-- Codec Test Files
http://html5games.com/ <-- excellent HTML5 games :)

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ttuuxxx
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#2 Post by ttuuxxx »

This is what it looks like, its the 2 bars, one on the left side and one on the right side. :) with the clock calendar etc.
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http://audio.online-convert.com/ <-- excellent site
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/ <-- Codec Test Files
http://html5games.com/ <-- excellent HTML5 games :)

jabu2
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Usability

#3 Post by jabu2 »

This "bling or no bling" thing is touching on what is an important issue for Puppy - usability (aka ergonomics, human-machine interfacing if you like). But this poll will achieve little and is wasting time and resources.

And it's not about widgets or pwidgets - or skins or favourite colours, or more clocks or more weather forecasts (of undoubtedly doubtful reliability :wink: ) they are just examples or symptoms.

Surely, Puppy is can be defined as a core OS with uniquely useful attributes (big list of these as we all know) , and with ability via packages/package loaders to add to the core in similarly useful and practicable ways. And for ALL users, ie a wide spectrum?

If this is the Puppy concept, then it is obvious that bling, in whatever guise, should be (a) non-core, but (b) easily added-on.

This has been done already with many superb packages etc and likely to get even more that way with Woofery?

Whether you want bling or no-bling becomes irrelevant. Any user should be able to add or ignore bling - it is not an issue worth voting on, or people wasting time on.

Before ttuuxx "responds" - he has made a couple of good points in the middle of his post e.g. :

1. (stuff) should come as pet package
2. puppy better less complicated, less background systems running, less system links, less resources and less things forced on you[/u]

but they are getting lost in the storm.

And 4.2 is better than anything we've had before, thanks to WhoDo and Uncle Tom Cobley (you're in there ttuuxxx)

- don't doubt it!

panzerpuppy
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#4 Post by panzerpuppy »

I like the look,but hate the curved bars - make them straight and you have a winner

The grey JWM taskbar looks old and lame - a terrible choice of colors. It doesn't match the rest of the theme.

The desktop looks better than Vista,but the volume and blinky icons look like Windows 3.11.Yuck.
Is there any way to change them?

The clock should also have a thinner frame.

Address these aesthetic issues and make this look the default and you'll have lots of happy users.

The current look of the 4.2 RC2 desktop is awful. Ugly wallpaper,crap widgets and no borders.
The final version should look like an improved version of ttuuxxx's screenshot above.
Last edited by panzerpuppy on Wed 11 Mar 2009, 08:30, edited 2 times in total.

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#5 Post by ttuuxxx »

panzerpuppy wrote: The desktop looks better than Vista,but the volume and blinky icons look like Windows 3.11.Yuck.
Is there any way to change them?
:D
Well JWM isn't my project its Zigberts, To this day I'm the only one who's given blinky a facelift on puppy, The one you see in icewm I made with Photoshop, sshhhhhh don't tell anyone:) I could do it to the JWM but 2 things would have to happen, one I would need the Blinky sources for JWM and zigbert would have to ask, I don't step on people projects. I could do the same with absvolume if I had the sources that was used for it.
ttuuxxx
http://audio.online-convert.com/ <-- excellent site
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/ <-- Codec Test Files
http://html5games.com/ <-- excellent HTML5 games :)

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#6 Post by esmourguit »

Bonjour,
In France we already have a president bling bling. That is two times too much. :D
I admit that I prefer a version of Puppy without artifice. That's what attracted me in Puppy, speed, ease of use, can do everything I need with a limited resources computer.
Anyone who wants to customize its distribution, may simply add all the gadgets that will make him happy, with pet packages.
This is also why I changed the shutdown menu. See here.
Cordialement ;)
[url=http://moulinier.net/][color=blue][b]Toutou Linux[/b][/color][/url] - [url=http://toutoulinux.free.fr/pet.php][color=blue][b]Paquets français[/b][/color][/url]

bugman

#7 Post by bugman »

i like it simple

[i've already said too much]

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#8 Post by gerry »

I like it simple too. I run Puppy on an old machine, and 4.2 uses more ram and more cpu than 4.12 when it's not doing anything, and it shows.

Gerry

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#9 Post by KJ »

KISS ... Please "keep it simple" for those of us that run older and slower boxes but want some newer features. My 16 year old grandson also runs Puppy and loves bling but still can't run much of it on his old laptop as well. He keeps adding until it crawls then backs off for a while.

Also, bling is such a matter of personel preference. There is enought disagreement about which "useful" programs to include and at what performance, memory, and iso size price so just providing a clean compact product that "works out of the box" is quite a task. Some bling.sfs's would be an easy way to make major upgrades, but pets also work for me.

Leave the customizing bling to the puplet developers and end users and keep the official Puppy lean, fast, and friendly.

Thanks for asking ..... KJ

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#10 Post by dejan555 »

Well, I voted YES, but I have a relatively fast system so I think that we should consider user opinions that run puppy on slower machines.
puppy.b0x.me stuff mirrored [url=https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_Mb589v0iCXNnhSZWRwd3R2UWs]HERE[/url] or [url=http://archive.org/details/Puppy_Linux_puppy.b0x.me_mirror]HERE[/url]

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#11 Post by battleshooter »

Definitely keep it simple. If you want more, that's what puplets are for. Don't put the developers out of a job :)

People can always add whatever they want to the original.

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#12 Post by Michalis »

I also voted No. The reason is because I want my system to be fast, or at least as fast as I want it to be. What I mean is that even if it's going to be included in the final release I want to have the ability to stop and remove pwidgets permanently if I don't want them or if they slow down my pc.

Actually we must remember what's puppy's purpose. Isn't to be lighting fast yet powerful, even in very old computers? Isn't to use the most modern software as possible even in computers 10, 12 years old?

I'm happy that I know that it runs fast on my old computer which is a P2 celeron at 366MHz! And I like that puppy is so light and fast.

Although most of the people probably nowdays use computers fast enough to not even notice any difference in the speed with pwidgets or other eye-candy addons, puppy is meant to be run in computers that the least extra use of cpu cycles and memory will be problem.


I have also to say that till now I haven't use puppy 4.2, so I don't know what's the penalty of using pwidgets, but definitely they must be extra and not build in. After all I believe that eye-candy stuffs must always be added after the decision of the user. Promote them, make two version of puppy 4.2 but give us a puppy without them also.

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#13 Post by Crash »

The first thing I do after a new Puppy install is get rid of all the icons except the Earth and the house. You can probably tell which way I voted. But each to their own. I prefer minimalist with the ability to make it as complex as you want later on. I'm sure Microsoft spent millions of dollars doing test sessions to arrive at their answer - and I still do a severe hack of their default when I do a first time setup.

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#14 Post by disciple »

this slows down the fixmenus script around 2-3 times longer than before
I've asked before, but if there was an answer I missed it. Why do we use fixmenus? It is possible to generate menus from the .desktop file when jwm starts/restarts (I think by way of a tiny executable), and I'm sure I've seen icewm do the same. It is incredibly fast, and way less annoying than the long wait while petget updates the menus every time you install a package... although I still don't understand that, as fixmenus only takes a couple of seconds when I run it manually.
If this is the Puppy concept, then it is obvious that bling, in whatever guise, should be (a) non-core, but (b) easily added-on.
Yes please. Think EZpup too.
I would apply this to:
- unnecessary stuff being turned by default.
- unnecessary stuff being put in the CD (unless it is extremely small or useful to the majority of people).
- default themes and stuff that might look pretty but make things hard to see... the default theme in Puppy 4 is a bad example :( Making things clear without looking ugly is actually something M$ has traditionally done reasonably well :) The icons particularly in Windows/Office 2000 are some of the best around for being clear at very small sizes.
Do you know a good gtkdialog program? Please post a link here

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#15 Post by 01micko »

bugman wrote:i like it simple

[i've already said too much]
Not enough
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#16 Post by droope »

01micko wrote:
bugman wrote:i like it simple

[i've already said too much]
Not enough
I realize there has been a lot of effort put into Pwidgets, and if it's not added it probably will be used a lot less.

But it should NOT, in my opinion be activated at a start. Perhaps already isntalled, but not activated at a start.


I am not aware of the size of Pwidgets, what is it?

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#17 Post by ttuuxxx »

last count 503kb compressed pet, for all 4 packages (conky included), you need to also remember that one of the its also the new icon switcher that has all those 133 system links in root/my applications also, Thats why I was thinking it would be great to have all that packaged up in one pet located at root, with a puppy pin to the package from the desktop, you click the icon, it installs, the new and a lot slower fixmenus script, icon switcher, pwidgets, conky, libidn, libxcb, startup shortcut, and any other addon script they have. If it was installed and turned off by default, we would still have the slower fixmenus, all the system links, installed, in a package we would have a choice. But I guess thats what puplets are for :)
ttuuxxx
http://audio.online-convert.com/ <-- excellent site
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/ <-- Codec Test Files
http://html5games.com/ <-- excellent HTML5 games :)

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#18 Post by droope »

ttuuxxx wrote:last count 503kb compressed pet, for all 4 packages (conky included), you need to also remember that one of the its also the new icon switcher that has all those 133 system links in root/my applications also, Thats why I was thinking it would be great to have all that packaged up in one pet located at root, with a puppy pin to the package from the desktop, you click the icon, it installs, the new and a lot slower fixmenus script, icon switcher, pwidgets, conky, libidn, libxcb, startup shortcut, and any other addon script they have. If it was installed and turned off by default, we would still have the slower fixmenus, all the system links, installed, in a package we would have a choice. But I guess thats what puplets are for :)
ttuuxxx
Is it really that much slower?

This is not a very politically correct thread, to say it in a manner. From the way you describe it, only 1 thing comes clear. You don't want it to be included.

Is it really that much of a drag? I mean, 503kb...

Perhaps it's buggy. right?



Maybe it can be added as an installed program, but with no widgets on the desktop... That'd be great for both parties.

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#19 Post by ttuuxxx »

droope wrote:
ttuuxxx wrote:last count 503kb compressed pet, for all 4 packages (conky included), you need to also remember that one of the its also the new icon switcher that has all those 133 system links in root/my applications also, Thats why I was thinking it would be great to have all that packaged up in one pet located at root, with a puppy pin to the package from the desktop, you click the icon, it installs, the new and a lot slower fixmenus script, icon switcher, pwidgets, conky, libidn, libxcb, startup shortcut, and any other addon script they have. If it was installed and turned off by default, we would still have the slower fixmenus, all the system links, installed, in a package we would have a choice. But I guess thats what puplets are for :)
ttuuxxx
Is it really that much slower?

This is not a very politically correct thread, to say it in a manner. From the way you describe it, only 1 thing comes clear. You don't want it to be included.

Is it really that much of a drag? I mean, 503kb...

Perhaps it's buggy. right?



Maybe it can be added as an installed program, but with no widgets on the desktop... That'd be great for both parties.
When it comes to bling I like it, when it comes to the look of Pwidgets, I love it, when it comes to my system resources and having a slower pc, I don't like it, Pwidgets is based on Conky, thats all and good, but Conky with a transparent background was always not made to run that way and slowed down your desktop somewhat, but Pwidgets is layering this, plus if you open Pprocess you have 3 pwidgets running and one xclock, if you add another widget you'll have another process running, once i had over 8 at once when I added a few features.
ttuuxxx
http://audio.online-convert.com/ <-- excellent site
http://samples.mplayerhq.hu/A-codecs/ <-- Codec Test Files
http://html5games.com/ <-- excellent HTML5 games :)

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#20 Post by disciple »

but Conky with a transparent background was always not made to run that way and slowed down your desktop somewhat
Is that true for Torsmo too? No wonder I had such a problem with it back in the day...
Do you know a good gtkdialog program? Please post a link here

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