Posted: Tue 09 Oct 2012, 16:43
One thing to take into account to do with bloat is that size on the disk doesnt equate to more ram usage or cpu usage so it doesnt slow the OS.jpeps wrote:You mentioned your choice of Puppy and DSL...for purposes of speed due to lack of bloating. DSL was just updated, I noticed, but they're keeping the old kernel so it's specifically for old computers. Likewise, Puppy is fast because it's efficient. You only load what you need. The tradeoff for lack of bloat is not everything in the universe works out of the box.sickgut wrote:
The only reason Puppy exists is because i was and still am trying to bring debian or ubuntu apt-get functionality to Puppy. However, i dont believe this can be done. Instead of OS specific package management (rpm's for fedora/ centOS and debs for debian/ ubuntu, pets for puppy...) vendors simply need to make high quality static applications/ programs (completely self contained within one directory/ folder, everything it needs resides in this one dir, there is no need to have dependencies and libraries scattered all over the OS) that are compiled to include all the dependencies in the application and then people from all major linux distros could create a central universal software repository for all the applications rather than debian and puppy and fedora keeping different, incompatible repositories and package managers.
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Maybe another 5 years maybe 10, maybe it will never happen. but i hope it does.
There are apps like CDE that easily create static builds in one folder. The problem is that they are large....the opposite of efficient, where many apps share the same tools. Linux offers different choices for different needs.
A blank DVD is less than $1 and it holds 4.3GB, a 4GB USB stick can be purchased for $6 - $10. HDD's are hundreds of GB or even multiple TB's in size. So this is why i dont think that a 99mb ISO is any better than a 600MB ISO, they can both fit on a CDROM and an both fit on even the cheapest USB sticks and if you are running a live CD and only using 99mb of its 700mb capacity you are just wasting space. I believe that disk footprint of an OS should only be restricted by the size of the media that you aim to install it to. However, this only applies to non copy to ram boot methods. With copy to RAM enabled then yeah, small is good. But computers with 1Gb RAM or 4 or 8GB are now the norm so even large ISO copy to RAM booting is becoming practical.
The above is why i believe that a trade off of size to attain compatibility is worth while.
Puppy is basicly perfect but like you said the working out the box is a little restrictive and also the packages that can be installed are not as much as other Linux OSes. The main cause of this is that libs and deps that really should be there are missing in favor of keeping the OS at 100MB ISO or so. Other than package management Puppy is the best. I hope to improve the package management thing and my Pussy OS is an experiment to see if its possible, hopefully one day we can make Puppy more compatible and the 5 people that are spending all their free time compiling apps for Puppy can take a break.
Just imagine Puppy with all its leet awesomeness being able to install everything with no hassle. Its a dream of mine.