Hello Q5sys! I believe that you are partially correct. Yes, Puppy is great for being minimal. And yes, Puppy can be easily expanded. But i still think that Volhout's idea is good.Q5sys wrote:Psychology 101.6502coder wrote:For people who want a fat Linux distro OOTB there are plenty of choices out there. I do not understand why so many Puppy users are so obsessed with "defending" Puppy and "converting" other people to Puppy. I choose to use Puppy for the same reason I choose to drink the beer I drink -- because I like it, and I could not care less who does or does not agree with my choices.
When people like something they want others around them to like it as well.
The problem is that when they try to introduce Puppy to friends, family, colleagues, etc; it falls short on those peoples expectations.
The reaction by these people who want to promote puppy; is to try to force the community to make puppy into what 'others' expect a computer should be. This causes people to try to push features and software that most people don't use; or at the very least shouldn't be included in puppy to begin with. Case in point, the push for SAMBA to be included as a default software package.
SAMBA is not needed by most people, and shouldn't be included in a minimal distro. Yet there are Puppy users that have been on a campaign for years about including it by default becuase it fits 'their opinion' of what should be included.
Puppy is great because it focus on running on older/minimal hardware with the least amount of bloat. Bloat can be added in later by a user, but should NOT be included by default. Lets for example talk about the look and feel of puppy; Theming. Users who want to focus on Puppy looking beautiful could come together and help develop/package different theme options so a user could eaisly change the look of their puppy. But has anyone done that, not really. A user or two has done it, but no real simple options have emerged from the community.
SFS packages are a simple way for users to help expand a regular puppy into new territories. To use my system as an example. I'm using Lighthouse 601 right now. The Base system is right around 200mb. I have an additional 1.4gb of expansion SFS files for all the extra software I'd want.
If a team of people got together they could take a Official release (like Slacko), and create a ton of SFS packages so users could easily update and expand their system.
But has anyone in the community stepped forward to do this? Not yet sadly.
For puppy to grow and encompass more users, we need more people to get involved in the creation. Right now the development work is spread too thin. If I had more time, I'd be willing to pitch in, but I dont. I'm behind in the dev work I'm planning to do with Slackbones and Lighthouse.
I'm willing to help guide someone who is willing to put forth the effort to expand the offerings of Slacko.
I totally agree on expanding a small Puppy with SFS files but as i discussed with another user yesterday, as far as i know it is supposed to be not a good idea to load more than 5 or 6 sfs files. Sfs are much better and cleaner for the system and the save file. But how can someone load many sfs files without combining them?"What if ...... under the puppy flag (mainstream, sanctioned by Barry) once in every 2 years, there is a well tested FAT version of puppy. The one for computer users. The one that has it all. This could coincide with a LTS release."