Although I only have a coulpe of posts in this forum I'm a puppy user since the early 2.something series and a bigtime lurker here.
My two cents on the future of puppy.
First of all thanks to everybody who is involved in this for this fast and small distro. These are the two big upsides of puppy- fast and small.
Puppys speed and bootup times are fantastic, the system itself is responding better than anything, even on my PII 300 mHz 128 MB ram.
Nevertheless I don't see why it is so important to stick to such really small distro sizes, I really don't care if my distro is 450 MB or 80 MB. The smallest harddrives that still seem to be working to this day are in the 500 MB range- so you could get an even bigger puppy to work anyways. The difference for the usual end user are a couple of mp3 or half a movie less on your harddrive- no biggie. Ok, it might be due to the unique way puppy runs from ram (or from swap- if you are on a really low end machine), but nevertheless, if you are on such low ram machines, you would probably use a full hd install anyways.
Long story short, although smaller is preferable, I really don't see why you shouldn't have Icewm or Firefox in your base distro when many folks seem to install it afterwards anyways- the cost is about 15 to 20 MB- who really cares...
.
Now the negatives. I'm sure they have been adressed elsewhere and I want to make clear that this is not a rant, it's just my point of view which I give so somebody can advance puppy.
The main reasons I don't run puppy on my main machine are the inconsistency between releases, packages not compatible between major releases, no real updates of packages, no automatic resolving of all the dependencies- do you get it?- you desperately need a good package manager.
One of the big advantages of the mayor distributions are the online repos. Why can't puppy have something like that? Its sooo convenient to just hit the add- remove button, select your desired program and click install. With dotpets and dotpups its like going back to windowsland and googling for setup.exes and whatnot.
Although I can see how the newer package manager in puppy tries to deal with the issue, and it has come a long way, I can't see the package manager as tightly integrated into the system like lets say apt-get. Automated kernel updates seem like out of the question right now.
The repos found in the package manager right now also seem very small. This I think is largely due to the inconsistent releases- you seem to have to repackage everything from release to release. Its like reinventing the wheel over and over again.
Just my two cents - and please don't get me wrong- his is not a rant but just my observations in about two years of puppy use.
Go puppy and all the best,
Christian
