I ran into this comment from Koulaxisis, on the puppy derivative thread for Slacko 5.5 XL.
This piece of text reflects what I have gone through few years ago, when I tried to recommend puppy to others. And I did give up (I was weak). I use puppy myself ... but recommend others to install Mint.....I really love Puppy and i have installed it in many friends' computers. But they are always nagging about the same thing: Puppy is not really ready by default for usage by a newcomer. They have to do a lot of customizations, extra setups and downloads - and they don't have the time or the will to do so! That's why i did this remaster... Most of them were about to stop using Puppy, they wanted something more "ready-to-do-the-job". So, i created this to make their computing life easier... and after testing it a lot, i decided to share with everybody, not only my friends.
The world has changed. 10 years ago puppy was great because it was good solution for people that came from Win98 or people tired of XP updates. And since then puppy has not really changed (I know this will upset many many people that spend endless hours to bring out new versions) from a USER perspective. For example.look at what the puppy 2.x and 4.x series could do, and how it looked. Only thing that really changes was the drop of analog modems, sometime SCSI, in favor of WIFI and such.
Nowadays people use W7, W8, Android, Apple, and do not accept that they will have install a programs for everything the are used to doing. i.e. to be able to make a (powerpoint) presentation. They are used to full office suits. They are used to "instant quality", and throw it away just as easily if something isn't meeting their expectation.
This should seep through into puppy's community. The besides the quality of OS stability, there is an additional demand for quality of usability OOTB.
Puppy has so many good things, but some of them are blocking off new users. Why is it that the puppy releases that contain quality programs like Libreoffice and Gimp are DERIVATIVES. Only because they are larger than the minimum size ... ? I realy see a good future for the larger puppies. Please make them "mainstream".
Look at quality programs: the best of the best. Look at ergonomics and eye candy. Users are used to this with their experience in Android (phones) and W7 and Apple. Don't do less. And if it gives an iso that is 670Mbyte.... so be it. But it is complete OS. Some developers already understand this (Lighthouse Mariner, PhatSlacko, etc...). But why are these "the derivatives" ?
This is a revolution like we had 10 years ago when we had to pull linux from command line to mouse based. And now "mouse based" should be perfected.
I keep believing in puppy, will continue to use it ..... And maybe there comes a time when all my friends PC's run Puppy, and not Mint.