Applications

[oldguy]

This is not related to any specific issue, so I gues it fits in misc. I was reading through the comments/topics and saw criticism of the age of utilities and packages in Puppy. The following observations are not meant to disregard anyones opinions but; I find the applications included useful. The specific complaint was with GK Dial. I found it to be very useful, I was able to configure my dial-up and surf the net within minutes. There is a tendency, in my view, to want the latest and greatest or latest version. of something. But if something just works, why replace it. If I wanted bleeding edge I could always use the development releases of larger distros. There might be valid reasons for preferring one utility or package over another, but age should not be one of them. An exception, of course, can be made if the application becomes so dated it is not supported by hardware. I like the current choices in Puppy and would hate to see them changed just for the sake of change. I use an older 500Mhz desktop and Puppy runs fine, faster than the Win98SE installed. I have stayed with 1.08rc1 since 2.01 looks to need more RAM than I have on this machine. Glad that development was continued on the 1.xx series.

[John Doe]

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[Sage]

Normally, I'd agree totally, OG. However, GKDial was singularly a bad example to pick - it is old, broken and often does not work. WVDial is quirky, but sometimes more reliable. It has to be a prime requirement that folk can dial out - these old diallers won't accomplish that simple operation for some. It seems to be a combination of old, unsupported code and the plethora of HW in use. I guess this must be the bane of Barry's efforts.
Personally, I prefer Beaver and Sylpheed, for example. Like I said. K.I.S.S. has to remain the guiding principle. Less is best. That is what live, compressed, compact Linux distros are all about. It may be fun to run Puppy up on the latest HW (anyone can do that!), but the real prize is loading it into a dusty ten-year old box picked out of the skip/dumpster. What joy.

[Flash]

Thanks, Oldguy; I wish I'd said that.

Who you gonna believe - Sage or your two lying eyes?

[marksouth2000]

Flash, you may disagree with Sage, but the form your remark took was entirely unjustified, smiley or no. The standard of discussion here is normally very civil, and that's a good thing.

[bugman]

I thought Flash's comment was funny, and meant to be so, not at all rude. Note the smiley face...

That said, I think gkdial is a piece of crap.

[rarsa]

Flash, you may disagree with Sage, but the form your remark took was entirely unjustified, smiley or no.

Sage is a good sport giving and taking Jabs, he has a good thick skin.

In this case though I don't think there was any bad blood on Flash's remark. Actually, I don't even think he was disagreeing with Sage.

Even more, Sage was not disagreeing with Oldguy. By saying "gtkdial is a bad example" he is implicitly saying that there may be good examples.