Just a few observations that I've made, now that BarryK has announced his 2nd retirement...
BarryK appears to be moving on to ARM development, smartphones and tablets. That may be well and good, but I own a tablet (which is based on Android, and an Android based smartphone, too), and I'll be damned if I wipe out the current operating system that it provides, along with a plethora of free-apps, for a niche distro. I guess I can see using Puppy on Raspberry, but again, it is a 'niche' distro...not too much there in terms of a user base. Raspberry is cool, cliche, but not so much mainstream. And I'm willing to bet that it never will be mainstream.
I for one think that Gnu/Linux will survive for another decade or so, desktop or otherwise. Businesses use it, so do developers (even ARM app-developers need desktops/laptops), not to mention those that run servers. And let's not forget the gamers. No, I don't see Gnu/Linux drying up and disappearing in the near future. Will it loose users? Most definitely. Casual users are moving towards tablets. Will it disappear entirely? No, I don't think that will be the case. Even though I have a tablet, and enjoy it immensely, I still find myself using my desktop/laptop at least (if not more than) 80% of the time. There's just so much you can do with a tablet.
And as far as Puppy goes, I'd like to see Puppy move towards a singular distribution (in terms of its base) in order to focus on its strengths. I realize that traditionally Puppy is geared towards older hardware; this is commendable, and should certainly be followed up on. But Puppy should also gear itself towards modern hardware whenever possible.
For my taste it seems that Puppy has become too diverse in terms of its development base. Why do I say this? Well, if you've ever tried to develop on woof2, you'd realize that it doesn't work as advertised. While it may work well with Precise or Slacko, it fails miserably with Wary/Racy, Debian and Arch builds. Arch fails to boot into a desktop (and has a huge ISO size), and Wary/Racy/Debian fail to download much or their required apps, and not just a few...many. It appears that it would be best to concentrate on one thing, which is traditionally the Linux way, and then to do it well. It's all well and good to provide support for Precise, but if BarryK has left the building, how long will that be a viable base for developers using woof2? Same with Slackware? Arch would be a good candidate being that it would use the latest packages because it is a rolling release and woof2 tries to pull in the latest packages, but if you can't even boot into a desktop, and the ISO is huge, what good is it? Wouldn't it be better to base it on a singular distro, say T2 or LFS, in order to make use a dedicated repository? In terms of hardware support, at some point don't you need to say "Ok, here's where the line is going to be drawn...we're going to support computers aged X and newer?". You can't be everything to everyone.
You know, on the one hand I applaud someone like simargl for developing something like his version/vision of ArchPup, which isn't a Puppy at all. But...on the other hand, I perceive him to be an a-hole; I see his attitude to be counter-productive in terms of advancing the Puppy-brand. And you may perceive my attitude to be the same (to each their own). It may be that in the (near) future this may be the future of Puppy development (not the paranoid "he's stealing from me" thing, but more so the totally custom builds that move things away from Puppy).
Well, these are my personal Puppy Linux rants. And my woof2 rants, too
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