I don't talk much here (I'm one of those barely contributing, always here folks), but I think it's about time I said something I wanted to say here months ago, but didn't feel was appropriate. I feel it is now.simargl8 wrote:If Puppy Linux is so perfect as you claim then why is Barry Kauler quitting, he's not going to
"retire" as claimed in title of this thread, he is actually switching focus to phone-desktop
all-in-one hardware and that read between the lines, means he's abandoning Puppy Linux.
This group has always demonstrated that they are capable of amazing things. I am grateful to Barry for what he created-- and only part of that is software. A bigger part of that is the community he created. An anarchic group of hackers and computer geeks who have proven they are up to the demands of the ideals of Puppy linux with respin after respin, improvement after improvement.
I made a simple respin of Ubuntu called Colorwheel that I felt I had to abandon after a single release because it started to become popular-- and I was maintaining it alone, working on my second version with a nice touch-friendly interface when I just gave up, installed Puppy to the hard drive, and joined this forum regularly.
I'd like to take a moment to tell you why.
After crashing my system again developing Colorwheel (having not made a cent but having lost money in a time my family was pretty broke), I was reaching for my loading my "Puppy safety drive" when I thought "maybe I should keep looking for a new base for Colorwheel". I found that an old distro I had seen from my youth had miraculously survived, and rushed to try it out.
The results were more than disappointing. I felt like the Linux world had passed the code by; it was like playing with an ancient system even though I'd just downloaded it. And the window manager fried my netbook. It was, by and large, unusable. I plugged on, trying to see how software was installed (limited rpm installs, or compile). Whoever was on the forum was genuinely helpful-- and alone.
As I reviewed the forum I realized it was a "revived" distro, and that many people trying it had questions. One person was answering. And in a sudden flash of clarity, I saw my future-- and it scared me.
The next day I quit and decided that going lone-wolf doesn't help anyone in the Linux world and it was time to join a community as opposed to failing at creating one. It took all of fifteen minutes to decide.
Another netbook meltdown and Puppy boot later, I did once again that which I did for a few days a year before-- I downloaded Puppy to the hard drive. I then crafted a goodbye letter on the Colorwheel site explaining myself, without mentioning my experience. I was originally going to put my explanation here and link it, as a recommendation (I simply included a link and recommendation to the site)-- because I wanted people to have what I knew was here, and what I wanted for myself, and I am sure Barry wanted and wants as well-- a knowledgeable, caring community that contributes well past a man's lifetime.
The difference is that he succeeded where most Linux devs fail-- he was able to bring people together with a great idea, and, well everyone loves dogs (except that Catguy but he still loves the system ideals).
Never have we seen a distro encourage respins to the point of giving it its own section. And sometimes respin ideas make it to the core code. But more importantly, Puppy is a simple but elegant design.
So I don't understand how anyone here is talking about abandoning it because Barry is retiring. He's even built the backend by which future Puppies can continue to be made (remember Woof, folks?). God forbid he passes on, but every man's appointed to pass on, and I'm grateful Barry's given us a chance to hash this out now while he can still help us with direction.
Find the libraries, find the programs in the system, and whoever uses Woof can just do a new system update and add the deps and programs. And then, new Puppy version!
For a system called Puppy Linux, Barry has bred a lot of Puppies and many of us know how to do the same. It's as simple as organizing a project group, or more simply, someone who knows how to use Woof to make versions based on the base distro updates. I know there are folks who know how to do that. Occasionally update the various programs.
Will everyone be satisfied? Nope.
And you know what we do here when we aren't 100% satisfied?Thank you, Barry, for making arguably the most sane GNU/Linux distro around. I don't know about you people, but I plan to breed another Puppy using XPrecise (maybe I'm working on another Colorwheel-- ok fine I destroyed my development drive again; it was looking like a 32-bit distro that made FatDog look relatively thin. Good thing I finally have Puppy on my hard drive so my computer's fine).
As for the rest of us: I vote we have an experiment.EDIT: This is apparently being done already with a transition group. So that's good.
