Standardization of Puppy Linux Desktop and App Platform

[Keisha]

...At this point the distros that can be taken seriously, IMHO, is Red Hat's offerings....

...and the two distro's which are basically RHEL without the branding and the expensive support subscription: CentOS (maintained by CERN in Switzerland ***edited: explanation of this shocking statement, below***) and Scientific Linux (maintained by FermiLab in Illinois).

Since Germany's SAP (it makes the manufacturing process management software used by Mercedes, BMW, and VW-Audi) has standardized on OpenSuSE, OpenSuSE is not going to disappear. It is possible that SAP may take OpenSuSE's further development in-house. No telling how this would affect OpenSuSE's availability.

One problem with settling on a single standard is, it makes you vulnerable to your distro being hijacked by whoever can gain control of that standard by first embracing it and then extending it to include their own proprietary tweaks. Microsoft is not the only offender in this regard. Just look at the devolution of KDE between versions 3.5 and 4. Or, look at how Ubuntu has fallen away from open source principles relative to Debian.

The universal consensus seems to be that LibreOffice is destined for success and Apache OpenOffice is doomed.

But the fact remains, every version of LibreOffice I've tried so far either fails to start or else crashes with bad result (e.g. involuntary reboot) on my local install of Quirky Unicorn. Meanwhile, Apache OpenOffice runs like a cross between a Swiss watch and a bat outta hell!

[8Geee]

Keisha alludes to a very sublime point, thats becoming as subtle as a thrown brick. I see standardization as an axiom of giga-corporate. Take a look for example at how Intel is developing according to a Windows standard, or how Android/Google is the nexus in smartphones. 32-bit is already a dinosaur waiting for that asteroid. Marketers push delta-tech, with a sugar-coating. We must change, we must advance, we must evolve. In reality, the "bill-of-goods" the end user gets has, shall we say some mysterious goings-on like data collecting in the OS, remote diagnosis and repair in the newest Intel CPU structures... unattended and unconnected, and other mysteries.

Diversity, and freedom of choice conspire against this, but at the CPU level, we are very much near standards, one for desk, one for portable, and one for mobile. Lets face it, ultimately the CPU dominates all things computing. We can get browsers to behave, an OS to behave, but we are all at the mercy of a CPU that tries to achieve standardization to a few very large interests.

My point here is standardization of Puppy is not, nor ever will be a good, positive thing, and Puppy like many other Distros in the world march to the beat of the CPU in the computer. When the CPU moves towards standardization, as it appears now, all things below the top of the pyramid are severely influenced.

[Q5sys]

CentOS (maintained by CERN in Switzerland)

Um... what? I've never heard that before.Scientific Linux is made in a partnership between CERN and Fermilab. It's been like that for years. These days CentOS is controlled by Red Hat... in that past though it was independent.

[Keisha]

The way I see it is this: CentOS is not maintained by CERN in the strict legal sense, but CentOS is maintained by Red Hat only in about the same sense as Ubuntu is maintained by Canonical.

In both cases, yes everybody is welcome to contribute and offer feedback, and yes there is a "Linux developer company" at which the distro is officially maintained.

But with both CentOS and Ubuntu there is both a 600-pound gorilla customer in the living room calling the shots who has the final say, and an 800-pound gorilla competitor.

With Ubuntu, Dell Computer is the 600-pound supporter gorilla: the main user group providing feedback and design input, and so each successive Ubuntu is finalized to accommodate Dell's needs, since Dell offers Ubuntu to its customers as its Linux alternative to Windows. And Canonical relies on Dell users (a significant percentage of whom are US government and especially military contractors and personnel) to form a large enough base to keep Canonical going as a viable business entity under increasing competition from 800-pound gorilla Microsoft plus every other Linux distro. So for all practical intents and purposes, when it comes to Ubuntu, Canonical is the calf and Dell is the cow, so Ubuntu is really a Dell product even though the DVD sleeve says Canonical.

Similarly, CERN is the dominant user group providing feedback and design input, and so the design of CentOS will be finalized by Red Hat to accommodate 600-pound gorilla CERN's needs. CERN in turn offers its own branded spin of CentOS to its academic and corporate associates as its Linux alternative to Windows. Red Hat is dependent on those users in turn carrying over the RHEL user culture to those corporations they move to and work with, to maintain Red Hat as a viable business entity under increasing competition from 800-pound gorilla Oracle and, in the future, perhaps OpenSuSE. So for all intents and purposes, at the present moment, when it comes to CentOS, Red Hat is the calf and CERN is the cow. So I say CentOS is a CERN product, even if the DVD sleeve says Red Hat.

[popey]

The way I see it is this: CentOS is not maintained by CERN in the strict legal sense, but CentOS is maintained by Red Hat only in about the same sense as Ubuntu is maintained by Canonical.

Ubuntu development is sponsored by Canonical in that we hired many people to work on the project. Many community people contribute, but Canonical is a significant single contributor.

With Ubuntu, Dell Computer is the 600-pound supporter gorilla: the main user group providing feedback and design input, and so each successive Ubuntu is finalized to accommodate Dell's needs, since Dell offers Ubuntu to its customers as its Linux alternative to Windows. And Canonical relies on Dell users (a significant percentage of whom are US government and especially military contractors and personnel) to form a large enough base to keep Canonical going as a viable business entity under increasing competition from 800-pound gorilla Microsoft plus every other Linux distro. So for all practical intents and purposes, when it comes to Ubuntu, Canonical is the calf and Dell is the cow, so Ubuntu is really a Dell product even though the DVD sleeve says Canonical.

Absolute rubbish. Dell is just one of our partners, and the development process doesn't work the way you describe at all.

[Keisha]

No, not rubbish at all. If you have an alternative explanation for this job title, let's hear it:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jndonovan

Dell and Ubuntu product announcements are, as a result of the collaboration, tightly interwoven. Example:
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter ... -canonical

"The enhanced collaboration efforts between Dell and Canonical over the last year have ensured that Ubuntu LTS releases and Canonical’s cloud deployment tools continue to run smoothly on Dell PowerEdge and PowerEdge-C servers."

[popey]

No, not rubbish at all. If you have an alternative explanation for this job title, let's hear it:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jndonovan

We have a number of partners, of which Dell is one. They're valued, just like our other partners.

Dell and Ubuntu product announcements are, as a result of the collaboration, tightly interwoven. Example:
http://en.community.dell.com/techcenter ... -canonical

"The enhanced collaboration efforts between Dell and Canonical over the last year have ensured that Ubuntu LTS releases and Canonical’s cloud deployment tools continue to run smoothly on Dell PowerEdge and PowerEdge-C servers."

Dell are a valuable partner, just like any other. They don't dictate the development of Ubuntu the way you described. That's nonsense. We take on board feedback from all our partners and some of it may or may not result in fixes or features, but it's not the way you describe it.

[Keisha]

Canonical is of course privately held, so you can issue blanket denials all you want, safe in the assurance that I'll have insufficient data to refute you.

So, if it wasn't Dell Computer, who *did* hold the gun to your collective heads and dictate you make the world suffer that maggot-choking piece of lunacy known as Unity?

[popey]

Canonical is of course privately held, so you can issue blanket denials all you want, safe in the assurance that I'll have insufficient data to refute you.

Take the tin foil hat off, it doesn't suit you.

So, if it wasn't Dell Computer, who *did* hold the gun to your collective heads and dictate you make the world suffer that maggot-choking piece of lunacy known as Unity?

Thought it might be worthwhile signing up to a forum to reply and have a civil conversation, regretting it now.

Ubuntu (and Unity) is used by millions of people each day. Get over it.

[mikeb]

Thought it might be worthwhile signing up to a forum to reply and have a civil conversation, regretting it now.

I tend to find it to be a barrage of opinions that have been implanted by the sensationalist press..... actually thats a pretty general comment thinking about it

And the suggestion that puppy would be better by not using following ANY standards at all seems an interesting basis to build popularity and a larger user base.

Mike

[Q5sys]

Thought it might be worthwhile signing up to a forum to reply and have a civil conversation, regretting it now.

I tend to find it to be a barrage of opinions that have been implanted by the sensationalist press..... actually thats a pretty general comment thinking about it

Normally I'd agree with you, but in this instance, Alan actually works for Canonical. So I'm pretty sure he knows what he's talking about over someone who has just read a press article that was written to drive traffic and get those precious clicks.

[Keisha]

Thought it might be worthwhile signing up to a forum to reply and have a civil conversation, regretting it now.

If I am so far off reality, and he is a Canonical employee, then he can easily summarily refute me: give us a link to a recent quarterly statement of Canonical's revenues, in which sources are itemized by corporate partner.

Otherwise let's drop it. I am sure there are many here who would welcome the opportunity to have a fruitful dialog with an employee of Canonical.

But I would add this caveat: just because he is a Canonical employee does not necessarily make his opinion authoritative or reliable, because it can be assumed he will follow corporate guidance as to what he should and should not reveal, regarding Canonical's present initiatives and future plans.

Suppose hypothetically for example that he is privy to advance knowledge that Dell is about to decline to renew Canonical's contracts, and so Canonical is desperately courting the likes of Samsung, HP, and Apple for new ones.

He would in such a case be likely to exhibit exactly the same display of denial and dismissal of the importance of Dell to Canonical, as he has.

Just sayin'.

@mikeb:

My point is the danger of settling on a *single* standard. Not whether standards in general are a bad idea.

Let's see...on this computer, running two Puppy variants depending on what I'm doing at the moment (DebianDog Jessie with the porteus boot method, and a frugal install of upup-3.9.9.1), I have applied openbox, lxpanel, infinality fonting, the Microsoft core webfonts, shinobar's portable Firefox and Google Chrome, a direct download of Apache OpenOffice...vlc with a full set of plug-ins, cairo-dock, Simple Screen Recorder, Skype, the qt, tcl/tk, python, perl, and java programming language and toolkit packages, plus gcc with its enormous retinue of associated utilities. Also wine so I can use IrfanView.

I fully comprehend why the initial smallness is a good idea. But it requires the addition of these (relatively) elephantine extras in order to make it useable. They are addable because they all conform to standards. Standards are necessary!

It occurs to me that, by settling on two unpopular standards, namely jwm as the window manager and rox-filer as the file manager and desktop icons manager, BarryK has made Puppy somewhat less vulnerable to embrace-and-extend hijack than the major distro's. Just like small companies often adopt "poison pill" stock issuance provisions as a defense against hostile takeover attempts by larger ones.

[mikeb]

Who said anything about forcing the adoption of one set of software .... standards are about methods not choices.... if every application had its own version of what to launch it with how the hell could any window manager produce a menu of any kind.
From the opposite view if a system uses a window manager that ignores any form of menu standard how the hell is the application maker supposed to get his or her app in the menu?

Normally I'd agree with you, but in this instance, Alan actually works for Canonical. So I'm pretty sure he knows what he's talking about over someone who has just read a press article that was written to drive traffic and get those precious clicks.

erm if you re-read what I wrote you should see I was saying just that and that I was saying that the sensationalism was coming via forum regulars not Alan...not sure how you got the opposite idea.

all fun

mike

[Q5sys]

Who said anything about forcing the adoption of one set of software .... standards are about methods not choices.... if every application had its own version of what to launch it with how the hell could any window manager produce a menu of any kind.
From the opposite view if a system uses a window manager that ignores any form of menu standard how the hell is the application maker supposed to get his or her app in the menu?

Normally I'd agree with you, but in this instance, Alan actually works for Canonical. So I'm pretty sure he knows what he's talking about over someone who has just read a press article that was written to drive traffic and get those precious clicks.

erm if you re-read what I wrote you should see I was saying just that and that I was saying that the sensationalism was coming via forum regulars not Alan...not sure how you got the opposite idea.

all fun

mike

Alan didnt mention that he was an employee, so I thought you might have assumed he was just some random person 'acting' like he knew what he was talking about. My bad, I assumed that part.

[Q5sys]

If I am so far off reality, and he is a Canonical employee, then he can easily summarily refute me: give us a link to a recent quarterly statement of Canonical's revenues, in which sources are itemized by corporate partner.

Otherwise let's drop it. I am sure there are many here who would welcome the opportunity to have a fruitful dialog with an employee of Canonical.

But I would add this caveat: just because he is a Canonical employee does not necessarily make his opinion authoritative or reliable, because it can be assumed he will follow corporate guidance as to what he should and should not reveal, regarding Canonical's present initiatives and future plans.

Suppose hypothetically for example that he is privy to advance knowledge that Dell is about to decline to renew Canonical's contracts, and so Canonical is desperately courting the likes of Samsung, HP, and Apple for new ones.

He would in such a case be likely to exhibit exactly the same display of denial and dismissal of the importance of Dell to Canonical, as he has.

Just sayin'.

First of his comment about being civil was a response to your aggressive comment about Unity, it wasnt a reference to anything you had said about Dell.

So what you're doing is saying:
Hypotethical Situation A would mean he's wrong.
Hypotethical Situation B could mean he's wrong.
Therefore what he says cant be relied on.

Thats so illogical I dont even know how to begin describing it.

Furthermore asking for him to produce Quarterly revenues is total misdirection. No company will publish their financial documentation because one person on a forum happens to come up with some total random crap about how another company is controlling them. And then taking the stance of "If you dont prove me wrong by doing this completely unrealistic thing: I'll claim victory.", is downright silly.


I'm actually quite surprised Alan took the time to com here personally and address your comments. I had just emailed him to ask him if I was wrong in what I had previously thought about Canonical/Ubuntu. I kinda feel bad asking him now knowing how completely illogical and non-grounded in reality you are. I doubt he'll be back to deal with these antics. He has much more important things to do with his time than have debates with people that are close minded. Which is a shame, I bet there are a lot here that would have enjoyed speaking with him.

[mikeb]

Alan didnt mention that he was an employee, so I thought you might have assumed he was just some random person 'acting' like he knew what he was talking about. My bad, I assumed that part.

no problem...just wanted to clear that point in one very heated thread.

Enough random persons here already

mike

[Q5sys]

Alan didnt mention that he was an employee, so I thought you might have assumed he was just some random person 'acting' like he knew what he was talking about. My bad, I assumed that part.

no problem...just wanted to clear that point in one very heated thread.

Enough random persons here already

mike

My personal opinion is that if communication was clearer, things would be a lot better all around.
Some times the concept of 'better communication' gets distorted into just being more words instead of better words.

[Smithy]

What do you think about using the Droid Font for Desktop and maybe the Noto font for Web browser as a "standard"?

I was testing it out as a system font and it seems to work very well, especially if QT is used and selected as the font in the sadly neglected root Trolltech.conf.
It clears up some not very nice overlapping look in Qjackctrl, after changing fonts in that app, married with cleanlooks over the GTK+ look.
Maybe VLC and other QT would benefit from this?

Hopefully, not too random, and still on topic even if a little simplistic

https://packages.debian.org/source/wheezy/fonts-droid

[Q5sys]

Maybe VLC and other QT would benefit from this?

I personally really like QT, but the feeling I get is that most in the Puppy world prefer gtk. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's always the feeling I've gotten. I think in part that's because of our long standing use of GTK and GTK based apps like gtkdialog.

On my list of things to do after I win the lottery is make a qt puppy, but those guys keep picking the wrong numbers, so you'll have to talk to them about making that happen. lol

[Smithy]

Ha, I don't trust those computers running the lottery machines, I've seen one of them fail once and it was glossed over on the big night..hmmm..

I actually like GTK engine, what I was getting at is whether a little more coding in the Trolltech.conf file could produce good results when we slip into an app that uses QT. So far the tones and pallette examples that I have seen are garish, guess I need to learn how to get some pastel codes and put them in the .conf.

As standard in Puppy, the QT apps are erm..grey, just need a little spice but not too much. This example is not bad looking on Qjackctrl (I don't have VLC or other apps) but it could get a bit Aaaaaaaaaaargh after a few weeks lol.
And you can see the problem with dejavu overlapping in the display.

Code: Select all

[Qt]
font="DejaVu Sans,12,-1,5,50,0,0,0,0,0"
GUIEffects=none
Palette\active=#f0f0f0, #1c1c1c, #bfbfbf, #9b9b9b, #818181, #5e5e5e, #e6e6e6, #ffffff, #f0f0f0, #070707, #111111, #9b9b9b, #3c3c3c, #ffffff, #6464e6, #e664e6, #0e0e0e, #000000, #040404, #e6e6e6
Palette\inactive=#f0f0f0, #1c1c1c, #bfbfbf, #9b9b9b, #818181, #5e5e5e, #e6e6e6, #ffffff, #f0f0f0, #070707, #111111, #9b9b9b, #222222, #f0f0f0, #6464e6, #e664e6, #0e0e0e, #000000, #040404, #e6e6e6
Palette\disabled=#535353, #181818, #bfbfbf, #9b9b9b, #818181, #5e5e5e, #4a4a4a, #ffffff, #5a5a5a, #060606, #0e0e0e, #9b9b9b, #0e0e0e, #535353, #22224a, #4a224a, #0c0c0c, #000000, #040404, #e6e6e6
style=cleanlooks