Supporting the PUPPY REVOLUTION

[marksouth2000]

Hear, hear!

[vern72023]

definitive SnowDog - but for me my plaything has become my main distro - which is actaully saying an awful lot about how stable this expermental distro has become.
I truly find it more stable than many of the mainstream Linux distros, and wintel - which seeing that I earn my living by engineering windows solutions is sort of poignant

[GuestToo]

i don't think of Puppy as just a toy distro ... i think that it is intended to be used every day, as your primary operating system

[SnowDog]

Just thought I should clarify my position, given the responses to it.

Re-reading my post, I see how I may have been overzeleous in my attempt to explain the experimental part, perhaps to the point of being offensive or giving the impression that I felt that Puppy is something less than the greatest operating system on the planet.

I was simply attempting to tell the new user (in the most friendly way I could think of) not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

I sincerely appologize for the derogatory tone that may have been taken from my inability to be more articlate in my post.

I'm posting now from SeaMonkey in Puppy 2.12 now, and out of 50 or so operating systems I have used, I must say this one is the simplest, fastest and easiest to understand.

[marksouth2000]

There is a problem of perspective when people first discover Linux, and the same thing happens regardless of what flavour of Linux that is. Namely, they like Linux, recognise its potential, and then start asking themselves why it isn't like Windows but better. This is, naturally, a trap, but an easy trap to fall into if one's thinking about computers has been entirely shaped by Windows for many years.

Part of the liberation offered by Linux is freedom from this restricted way of thinking, but we all need to understand where that thinking comes from and how to be sympathetic towards it.

For example, in another thread, BigLitter has already learned how to set up dual monitors under Puppy and written the how/to on the subject, which is cool. Kudos, right?

But even from a position like that, it's all too easy to forget, and to continue thinking of oneself as a customer instead of a participant, and and operating system as a product rather than as an experiment.

My own position: Linux is cool. Puppy is the coolest of all. There are hundreds of Linux distros, and most of them are focused on being a useful tool for a specific purpose (probably too many focused on being a great desktop solution). For many puposes, there are other distros better than Puppy. But most of the time, Puppy is the simplest, fastest, most fun solution.

Barry has created something amazing here, and (with SnowDog here) we are EXTREMELY lucky that he lets us play with his toys and even lets us modify them sometimes

Cheers,
Mark

[BigLitter]

SnowDog's summary of where Puppy is at, even if flawed, is brilliant and highly useful. Both vern72023 and SnowDog are essentially commercial users of Puppy and their statements constitute serious (rather than just emotional) testimonials on behalf of Puppy.

So you have a first-class and practically useful operating system that is at the stage of being fun and games. But things grow up, and it might not be realistic to think that Puppy can be kept at this stage indefinitely. And maybe, just maybe, it's time to start thinking about the next stage of development.

[pelokwin]

Hey Hey Hey,
I just sat and read this post and EVERYONE made valid points but as I am not even close to the tech. Level of all (if not most) of you, One point about puppy was it seems is never touched on. (it goes for other distros also but this is pupworld) Window$, mac$, and other,O$'s seem to me in the past 10 years to be heading in the "user friendly" direction. That's great but it is also taking the control out of the users hands. When I started using puppy the first lesson I learned was puppy was not going to walk itself. I have to feed, play, groom,water, and pet this dog .
Anyone who found puppy and is not high on the computer knowledge from the start soon starts to be. I know that it was most likely not the goal of all of the folks that make puppy for it to be a " how to take back control of your computer" class but for me and I hope for others it has and I am very grateful.
(started with pup1.0.8-----now at pup2.0.1 on two different laptops one work one play)

[Braden]

I think Puppy has put lie to the idea that easy-of-use and control/power are a spectrum.

Puppy has placed a safe and user-friendly interface on top of Linux, which is normally perceived to well over toward the control/power end of the spectrum. And indeed that control is there, if you want it. I imagine it has taught many people aside from pelokwin a lot about how their computer works. The key point is that it didn't force them to learn it the hard way, as Linux in general tends to do. They went looking for more control, and found it, along with some knowledge. I actually did this last night, adding a couple of "quick-launch" icons to 2.12. I learned a lot about JWM, and I'll probably be writing a tool to add/remove these icons, if there isn't already one.

On the other hand, if a user doesn't want more power, they aren't going to stumble across it by accident and rm -rf /. Ignorance of how to cause damage, combined with fear of the command line and other power tools will keep users who shouldn't be there away from it.

[Pizzasgood]

Anyone who found puppy and is not high on the computer knowledge from the start soon starts to be. I know that it was most likely not the goal of all of the folks that make puppy for it to be a " how to take back control of your computer" class but for me and I hope for others it has Very Happy and I am very grateful.

Actually, that's one of the things I like the most. I actually find Puppy easier to use than XP, because I don't have to fight it to do anything. If I want to do something, I just do it. Changing the window-manager is simple. There are no "branding issues" with changing (or adding in this case) a boot-splash. And I don't have to mess around with anti-virus, spyware, or all-night defragmenting sessions.

As for plaything, the only time I don't use Puppy is when I need Windows, mainly for games. I do almost all my homework and even some paying work within Puppy. Until three days ago, I always had Vector Linux installed as a "backup," but I've hardly used it since Puppy got the usr_devx.sfs file (as it was called back then). Three days ago I reorganized my partitions (from within Puppy) and dropped Vector while I was at it. I fully intend to use Puppy to enhance my abilities and possibly as a basis for a career. If nothing else, I can already put down several interesting things on my resume thanks to Puppy, including volunteer work and the whole Pizzapup thing. In fact, Puppy already helped me get some scholarships and even a small "part-time" job that I've made over $400 on so far.

So for me, Puppy is much more than a "plaything," although I definitely play with it at least as much as I work with it.

[BigLitter]

Oops! No delete! ' '

[BigLitter]

Totally agree with peloquin. And Braden's wording sums it up:

I think Puppy has put (the) lie to the idea that ease-of-use and control/power are a spectrum.

Pizzasgood's testimonial is substantive. Linux wins! Coming from years of XP I've got to say, first: It was Puppy that led me to even look at learning another operating system. Second: There's absolutely no comparison between Linux and XP as far as elegance of architecture, pleasure of use and learnability are concerned - Linux just takes all the prizes hands down. And third: I've already decided, regardless of the outcome of this discussion, that this is a permanent migration away from XP for me. What I've seen here is far too attractive to go back to that mess! Puppy has migrated me, a power-user and system installer, from XP to Linux, which if you'd asked me a month ago I would have said couldn't be done.

This system, guys, is a winner! Everybody I've ever met who uses XP (at the power-user level) is fed up with it, one way or another. Puppy needs to be commercialized. Maybe we should try to get Barry to form a cooperative and do a novel kind of financing, where the forum members buy shares and end up owning the product. Microsoft's sales for the current quarter (to 31Dec06) are estimated at $12 billion. Even one tenth of one percent of that ($50 million a year) is enough to make a lot of puppies!

[raffy]

BL, maybe it will help if you identify your niche, the sphere of human activity (ahem) where you can help promote/develop Puppy. When you do, you will also be able to start something and not wait for anyone to do the first step.

There is one "commerce" area where you may have the talent, and that is in putting up ecommerce for moving unconventional devices (gumstix, for example) from factories to users (is this activity called "selling"? ). Of course those devices will be using Puppy. And how to put Puppy in those devices is part of the challenge.

[pelokwin]

BL,
Not to dive into another topic altogether, but if puppy was to go on to be a
commercial product wouldn’t it then ...not be the product that we have been raving about? Ok so how ever you slice it the idea of selling ANYTHING is to make the buyer pay much more for the product then it is worth and still make the buyer feel like they are getting their moneys worth. To do that you must some times change the product to meet the trends of the times. (Even if the trend is non productive) What always burns me in technology is that I always feel like I am somebodies puppet. Buy this product or fall behind, so I buy and one day later it is out dated and I must update by buying more stuff that I really don’t want to just so I can read an excel sheet . Puppy showed the idea that you can still be up to date with out spending $$$$$$$ for needless stuff ,if you just get rid of the crap that makes you need the new hardware in the first place and learn to do it yourself. Sooo now back round to if you put puppy on the market, I fear that the masses will say “why should I pay for a product that I have to do all the work?

[vern72023]

puppy is part of the open source movement, at its core that means that when it is distributed all of the source code that it is copiled from must be available to the user, so in that sense it cannot be sold.

As with IBM & RedHat, or Novell & SUSE, the only part you can market and sell, the only part you can commericialize, is the "maintainance and support" .
The company I work for has a huge contract with IBM to supply just that.
We are locked in to whatever IBM decide to promote and support.
It also has a huge contract with Microsoft to supply Windows support.
The "versions" of both that we use are not available to the general public.

IBM and MS both have employees directly embedded with us who are paid for by their companies but matrixed into our supply chain organization, with their own offices and entries in our corporate messaging systems etc.

I have no problem working with these guys , they are some of the best engineers in their respective fields and in the MS and IBM corporations., however there are downsides to "commercializing" any system.
Not least of these are the processes dictated by legal concerns, privacy concerns, compliance concerns, audit and sec, sox, glb, concerns.

I hope you were joking about commercializing Puppy, since if that was ever done then Puppy would no longer be Puppy and would soon become just as bloated and bridled as those other distros by necessity have become.

I use Puppy as my main system at home precisely because it is not those things, and does not have to be.

I have to use and be familiar with RedHat and Windows because that is what I get paid an obscene amount of money to do. But in my private affairs, outside of a huge corporation with its mandatory standards and controls, I dont have to.

[Pizzasgood]

That isn't to say there aren't ways of making money with Puppy. You just can't really sell Puppy itself. Making a customized version for a fee, running an internet cafe, selling machines with Puppy pre-installed, etc. are all indirect ways of churning a profit. Of course, all such endeavors should donate back to Puppy. In that sense, the people doing it could be seen as part of the overall Puppy system, funding the development and testing.

[BigLitter]

pelokwin has put the dilemma of consumerism pretty well. And yes, as he seems to have understood, I'm not supporting following in the footsteps of that sterile mentality... which is an outlook that a good many of us Puppy enthusiasts probably have in common. What I see in Puppy in particular, is a way to extend the benefits of computers (education, communications, and a whole bunch of things that haven't even been implemented yet, like cashless trading systems) downwards, in the socio-economic scale, towards the 2 billion of our fellow 'passing thoughts' who can hardly afford the necessities of life. Not to mention the less privileged element of our own school populations, whose struggling single parents I have rebuilt Windows computers for on more than one occasion.

A priest in the Philippines, I think, is doing great things like this with Puppy. And there's a picture on one of the sites of a community center with TEN computers, that was set up with Puppy for $55... I don't know if that's in Australia.

vern72023, shit man, you're a pretty heavy-duty computer guy when you come right out like that! That's quite the excellent lesson on the open source side of the situation. The big problem that I was trying to stir up an answer to was really this very one of support. Is there a way to set up Puppy to generate enough income to provide support for its ongoing development? Is there any interest in shifting the perspective slightly amongst even a core group of enthusiasts, away from the fun and experimentation, and slightly more towards some sort of medium-term commitment to providing support?

The average user will learn (see pelokwin above), that's not the problem, but they won't start unless it's easy. And the average tech doesn't want to be investing (time and learning) in a system that's not going to be here tomorrow, or to set up a whole bunch of clients on a system he can't support, who will end up worse off than they were when they eventually have to buy back into Windows. So that's the dilemma. Maybe there's no answer. Maybe Pizzasgood's right and it's a question of the humble grind, or marksouth2000, and its all a question of attitude.

[pelokwin]

Hmmm,
Maybe the answer is right in font of us.... or right in front of big litter. Work is work and business is business, but there is a world outside that where things aren’t cut and dry. Puppy IS an open source so that source should stay open and lets take what we learn here to IMPROVE things, teach people , and help each other. I mean hell think of it schools with puppy instead of paying money to already rich folk( nothing against you rich folk out there ) they can use that money to improve the school in other ways, like art or music or gym.