Weekend Journal of Thoughts on the future of Puppy/Linux

[tronkel]

Here I go again - thinking thoughts about Puppy in particular and Linux in general. Have to be careful - thinking ought to come with a health warning!

I am sitting here at home. My wife is sitting cuddling the Android tablet that I bought for her as a present (she rarely lets go of it). I do the same with my Android smartphone.

In this house there are two quite powerful PC's that run Linux 99.99% of the time that they actually get used - plus 3 netbooks. (exclusively Linux).

This is mad. I could save a fortune, as well as reclaim valuable living space by replacing the PCs and netbooks with a good big tablet(s). Tablets can be used while lying back comfortably in an armchair - far healthier than sitting upright at the PC with feet down on the floor.

The only reason I use the PC at all is to play with Puppy and sometimes Debian/Ubuntu. I find myself using the PC less and less. The tablet and smartphone often simply duplicate PC/Netbook functionality.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who is coming to the inevitable conclusion that the PC era is slowly declining and is in the evening years of its life (something like me LOL).

This has prompted me to consider moving all my computing activities over to tablets. The one thing that prevents this is the lack of Puppy running on a tablet. Not interested in Apple tablet. A tablet running Puppy is a prerequisite for my ditching of the PCs and netbooks - but that is what I'm aiming to do in the end.

To me it's now academic if Windows or Linux has won or lost on the desktop. Events on the ground have simply overtaken this question. If many other people apart from me are thinking along these lines, then the effects of this on Microsoft, Intel, Google and of course Linux itself, are going to be profound. Private as well as business uses of computing are involved.

The time has not yet arrived when I can realise this ambition
but a touchscreen version of Puppy Linux running on a good big tablet would be the decider for me. Goodbye PCs laptops and netbooks. You've all been great to know but it's now time to move on.

Wonder what Barry would have to say about this as regards developing a touchscreen "Puppy for Tablets"?

[Terryphi]

Tronkel, you point up the issue very clearly. However, your lifestyle and needs are very different from mine. My other OS is Ubuntu and I am appalled where it is heading with Unity, effectively deserting the PC desktop, I was thinking that the future of Puppy is precisely on the desktop!

I see a big split in focus coming which I assumed was generational but you claim to be part of the grey brigade. I have a laptop but rarely use it. I have no need to be mobile. I want a big screen which suits my eyesight while I sit in a comfortable chair at Mission Control.

[Dougal]

Tablets can be used while lying back comfortably in an armchair - far healthier than sitting upright at the PC with feet down on the floor

This is how I use a netbook...

Desktops are meant for doing work. For leisure, you can:
- Use a netbook with Puppy
- Stick with a Android-based tablet
- Wait for x86 tablets to arrive (Intel want that to happen...) and use something like Puppeee.

[Bernie_by_the_Sea]

I see a big split in focus coming which I assumed was generational but you claim to be part of the grey brigade. I have a laptop but rarely use it. I have no need to be mobile. I want a big screen which suits my eyesight while I sit in a comfortable chair at Mission Control.

I don't know about the grey brigade -- I'm only 83 but I'm slowly moving towards joining those old people.

At home I use only a desktop. I have three laptops. Two of them are in the closet not even turned on in a couple of years. Batteries are probably shot by now. The other laptop my wife uses on occasion in bed but 99% of the time she uses her own desktop. I have a very comfortable high back reclining Captain Kirk computer chair that swivels with arms and a hydraulic up/down mechanism with a large screen monitor.

When mobile I have a BlackBerry with three browsers (BB, Bolt and Opera) plus two YouTube viewers plus a 180-channel TV viewer plus Flycast and Pandora for music. I usually have 5 or 6 movies downloaded in it when I'm stuck in a waiting room somewhere. I've got two ebook readers and about 30 books. Before the BB, I had a Treo for years with similar apps. The screen is small but I usually don't have any trouble browsing or reading forums like this one. I like something I can stick in my shirt or pants pocket -- I have a metal ribbed leather case that takes pretty much any beating. I’ve been happy with both the PalmOS and BlackBerry OS. Ideally an OS should be invisible -- you should never know it's there.

My kids (in their 40s) all have Android smartphones plus they usually tote around fairly large laptops but none still have a desktop. None like tablets. Is that the future?

[tronkel]

Bernie_by_the_Sea wrote:

None like tablets. Is that the future?

There's a heck of a lot of work to be done before tablets finally become the future (to the exclusion of PCs etc.). I personally think that it will happen - and sooner rather than later.

If you compare Puppy with Android, many key apps are packaged to well under one MB in both cases. If anything, Puppy is probably even more size-conscious that what Android is. Firefox 4 (Fennec) for Android is a whacking 25MB+ download for example.

In order for the tablet to be able to replace the PC, the tablet would have to make content creation as easy a task as it is on the PC. Android is nowhere near that stage and may not become so in the near future. This leaves the field open to Puppy which can run apps such as LibreOffice, GIMP etc. A comfortable programming experience with stress-free text-inputting/compiling would also be a priority for me. The tablet would need to achieve all this while still conserving battery power in the frugal manner of say, the Apple tablet.

Debian has a version that runs on the ARM processor. Maybe a cut-down and puppyfied Debian is the way to go here.

Discovery:

Why is it that when I type in the name of the latest Apple tablet in a forum message , the text gets automatically replaced with an expletive??? I'm not kidding either - try it. Do the Mods know about this?

[aarf]

Ipad spam. Do the mods know? They are the ones responsible for the word censoring. Mods=flash.

[bugman]

I'm sure I'm not the only one who is coming to the inevitable conclusion that the PC era is slowly declining and is in the evening years of its life (something like me LOL).

eek, what a depressing thought

i never see tablets in the dumpsters - in fact, have never seen a tablet at all, and have only a couple of times used someone elses laptop, reluctantly

are tablets and laptops the same thing? then maybe i have used one - or are they like big cell phones? i used a cell phone once

hopefully the desktop pc will be supported for a few more years - while i'd like to go computerless some day in the future, i'm not quite ready yet

[tronkel]

@bugman

Now's your chance of a lifetime.

If you play your cards right, like getting right into tablets smartphones, cloud computing etc.etc. you might just get blamed for bringing the whole of the PC industry to its knees!

Now THAT would be something LOL!

You could unselfishly celebrate by giving that big black cat of yours some extra treats, fish, cream, Sheba or whatever!

[Lobster]

Guys, Cats, Bugman, Jack (Tronkel), Fellow Puppys,

As some of you know I have to travel into the future
as part of my research. Sadly at the moment this happens
more on the astral than the actual . . .

Here is how it happens:
Already the next generation of PC's or smartphones
with cloud franchises geared for mainstream capitilisation
and bubble.com exploitation is arriving . . .
Big phones - that is tablets
are a part of the transition.

Puppy needs to run with Icecream (the Android after Honeycomb)
If buying a tablet you should ask if it is biodegradable . . .
- yes for now you are mad but future devices will be biodegradable
because of the litter program of disposable smartphones
Some of the greener ones will come with a case of embedded seeds
making everywhere flower . . .

The next generation e-ink devices will lead to tablets so thin, you can roll
them . . . needs time, as e-ink will only be seen in Ipad 3, if we are lucky
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_Paper

In China and Africa people are connected by satellite
to their next generation PC's (that is smart phones)
Many can not afford keyboards, mice and large screens.
You don't have to be able to read too much to use a mobile phone
- so guess how people are educating themselves out of illiteracy?

Tablets are premium Western consumer products but not for too many years.

Printers are largely obsolete for many people.
I believe some dinosaurs are still using faxes . . .

Like bugman I have rarely used a cell phone.
The ones I would run come with franchised deals
and 12 month or more contract killings (for the providers)

Yep we need to be on ARM
Woof needs to be Android compliant
. . . in an ideal world . . . everywhere is a wifi hotspot . . .
http://www.publicip.net/

[tronkel]

What is the situation with Chrome OS? This system could just be important for tablets. It is based on Debian so could run on an ARM processor in theory?

Chrome OS is conceived as a cloud-based system. These days there are ever increasing numbers of websites that can offer useful creative content creation over the web. These might suffice as interim solutions until such time as say, LibreOffice, can produce a native Android or some other version that can run with an OS running on ARM.

There are strong rumours circulating that Google is going to drop Chrome OS in favour of Android. Maybe they should seriously consider not doing this. This OS Cinderella might just rise from the ashes and make an ideal solution for content creation on tablets.

[aarf]

In China and Africa people are connected by satellite
to their next generation PC's (that is smart phones)
Many can not afford keyboards, mice and large screens.

you've been reading too much of that propaganda again haven't you.

[technosaurus]

re: tablets
zigbert's ptray has xvkbd swallowed in a jwm tray (i think ... I set mine manually in .jwmrc-tray) - excellent for touchscreen input.

I have gone in a different direction with development ... porting and simplifying apps/wizards _back_ to dialog/xdialog so that stuff will work from cli or x and use gtk1 version of xdialog for reduced resource usage.

[bugman]

Some of the greener ones will come with a case of embedded seeds
making everywhere flower . . .

you're giving me ideas again

a basement full of old computers and monitors

let a hundred flowers bloom

[vtpup]

Having used a $99 Chinese clone tablet with great enthusiasm for several months, and even seeing Linux run on it with much effort, I'm back to toting the old clunker laptop around and using that 90% of the time.

Conclusions: I'd take the tablet on a vacation to the beach (haven't had one of those in the last two decades, though) to read books from, and catch up on mail, etc.

But typing anything complicated on one is painful, and seeing much of things like drawings, or text markup and layout is pointless. So I don't think the tablet will ever replace a keyboard and good sized screen, (meaning a laptop, at the least) for anything "serious".

On the other hand, no point in toting around a keyboard and mouse to watch a movie or read a digital book, or listen to music.

So, to me, one is an entertainment-communications device.

The other is, well, a computer. Pardon my French

Now, in Lobster's future vision, if we had an big paperlike screen that when folded, was wallet sized, and a stylus that could somehow accurately type on this "paper" with pretty characters as fast as we could move our fingers ... and also draw spline curves, and straight lines, etc based on our finger movements --- let's just call that device a "pencil", you'd really have something. Okay, a couple more things. Something to give dimensions to our drawings, let's call that a "ruler", and a calculator that was attached to our brainstem that could give answers to mathematical questions on the "paper", showing the symbolic steps used to arrive at the answers, so we could check them, I think that might be a really amazing boost to personal creative freedom and capability.

[Lobster]

Not really my vision. It is where firms like Nokia are heading
http://youtu.be/IX-gTobCJHs

I really would need USB for my mouse and keyboard
on existing tablets (part of the time)

[vtpup]

Not really my vision. It is where firms like Nokia are heading
http://youtu.be/IX-gTobCJHs

I really would need USB for my mouse and keyboard
on existing tablets (part of the time)

Just kidding about the vision, Lobster.

Re. the other, I've found that carrying a USB mouse and keyboard around with a tablet then plugging in cords, etc, is much less handy than just bringing a laptop with no cords. There's no space savings with tablet plus components, and the screen resolution/acreage is much poorer

Also the tablet then needs to stand up on its own since it is designed to be hand held and punched with an finger. Viewing angle is not great lying flat on a table -- especially with a keyboard and mouse in front of it.

I can get to work, on serious stuff, in a coffeeshop for instance, much faster and easier on a laptop than on a tablet with mouse and keyboard, etc.

Even one of those roll-up rubber keyboards.

I'm not knocking tablets, but they are best as just tablets. I'll be keeping my notebook.

[Lobster]

I'm not knocking tablets, but they are best as just tablets. I'll be keeping my notebook.

We are moving towards different devices but expecting a common
or generic interface.

So for example, Puppy has two or three screens
with the same icons on all

By offering apps, coms and config
or whatever is the norm, on smartphones on separate desktops
we move towards an expected outcome

Pencils and notebooks no matter the diversity
have a commonality.

My feeling is we should be developing a look and feel familiar
to smartphone users, rather than sticking with legacy Windows
familiarity.

Simplicity is the key.
Puppy manuals should only be required by developers
and for complex tinkering.
If I have to learn how to use a tablet. phone, OS or application
it is already obsolete as simpler solutions evolve.
. . . must keep taking the tablets . . .

Puppy adaptation
breeds innovation

[vtpup]

i agree Lobater -- example: Opera on Android on the tablet has some really convenient tablet oriented features -- the menu of bookmarks for instance is composed of graphic icons made from a thumbnail snapshot of the page you were on when you bookmarked it. So it isn't a drop down list, it's a page of a matrix of images, and you select the site by clicking on the picture of the site. Looks like a photo proof sheet -- if you're old enough to remember those

I was thinking that we ought to get rid of computers and monitors -- who needs the box-- actually and focus on keyboards. We really need those.

Just put the CPU in the keyboard, and use a pop-up pod to project an image onto the desktop. The physical one, that is. Or a blank piece of paper on it maybe. Course you can "plug" into a similarly smart monitor via IR or wireless, etc, if need be.

Drives ought to be smart and wireless, too.

[puppyluvr]

Hello,
Heck, lets get rid of the keyboard too...
Something like this???

[vtpup]

Mold some key bumps on the table.

Wait, how about something edible with bumps, so when you're done you can have lunch.

keyboard pizza with strategically placed pepperoni, or a heat resistant chocolate bar with 102 pieces, ya know something like that....