Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

[bigpup]

[Pizzasgood]

I'm not keeping anything away. What I did was move all the old unsorted stuff into a subcategory of its own. I gave warning that I was planning on doing that and asked if anybody had any problems with it. Didn't get much feedback. Of course, some people probably never saw that and are wondering what just happened...

Now I appear to be getting at least a little feedback. Great. I get worried when everybody is just silently accepting whatever I do. I'm here for you guys, not myself. Categorizing things does nothing to help me, since I hardly even use Puppy anymore (I built my own linux from scratch and use that).

I can undo the whole Unsorted thing, putting them back into the main area if that would be more intuitive.


@bigpup: Maybe I was a little unclear. I didn't mean that "Internet" would be a subcategory of "Network". I meant they would be merged into a single category. The only subcategories I had in mind are the ones that are indented: "Eye Candy", "Drivers", and "Security/Privacy".

Granular categories are nice in some ways. They help to limit the number of packages you have to search through. But the problem is that we can only chose one category. The more granular the categories, the more of them that a single package falls under. That makes it harder to decide where to place the package and harder to figure out where to find it. They can actually lead to expending more effort searching multiple categories for a package. The current categories are about the limit of granularity before that begins to become a large problem. Granularity also increases the number of categories that exist, which makes it harder to see an overview of all the software because they're spread out through a bunch of categories. We're probably still missing a couple categories with the current layout. I'm still not sure what to do with qbrew, for example.

The idea behind the alternate categories I proposed above is to decrease granularity, resulting in simpler decisions about where to look for various software and easier ability to see what is available, and decreasing the need to keep adding more oddball categories.

It's just a proposal though. I don't know if it would be a good idea or not.

[bigpup]

Pizzasgood,
I can see you are using that college education to evaluate your ideas. Low feedback can mean two things. We do not care or we like it.
A little tweaking is good, but not too much. The categories you have now are fine for me. It has made it much easier for me to find stuff. It just takes getting to know them. Like I said before, these are used every place software programs are listed.
The one category I have never liked is utilities. It always seems to be a place for a mixture of stuff that could be placed in other categories. I know they are little "utility programs", but it still gets to be a big mix of stuff.
I can say, that it is much easier to find stuff now then before.

I install a new version of Puppy and need a new video driver-category Driver.
I want the latest web browser- Category internet.
I want the latest version of wine- category Virtualization.
I want to check on the program dude- category Desktop.
I want a new file manager-category Filesystem.
Seems a lot better to me!