This only works if you are always planning on installing puppy.[1] Puppy has always been a live CD. If these programs aren't available in the live CD then you can't do MS compatible word processing / spreadsheet handling.nic2109 wrote:For many Abiword and Gnumeric are adequate while others add Open Office as a matter of course. If these apps which are frequently superceded by bigger ones were themselves in an .SFS file then they could be dropped as easily as their replacements can be added. Is there any mileage in moving a selection of such apps into a seperate file?
One of puppy's original goals was to breathe life into old hardware. Very often in these old systems the processor is the limiting factor and is hard or uneconomic to upgrade. RAM however is often a very simple upgrade. I can take 3 junked 300MHz systems with 128MB RAM, shove all the RAM into one of them and it should do a reasonable job of running puppy. One of the reasons that puppy can work snappily in this scenario is because all the base applications are permanently in RAM. Extra sfs files are not loaded into RAM. If you put abiword and gnumeric into an extra sfs file puppy loses its advantage and is in fact disadvantaged because it has to load the executables from disk and use the processor to decompress them.
Of course you could use each the 3 systems above to do a full install with 128MB RAM, a direct comparison of the two would be interesting, I'm sure there is one round here somewhere.
Some of the above comments about performance are my unsubstantiated opinion and if any one has results that contradict I would be interested.
[1]unless you are proposing a new class of applications that are stored on CD and loaded when needed, in which case you have lost the ability to run without the CD mounted.
who is designing new icons . . .
of much of what you say here. I have found resizing the desktop icons..a bit of a pia so far. 
hehe!