(old)Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Getting more users to use puppy... and more devs to help develop it.

Suggestion:

Better Advertising

Puppy is great for lots of specific purposes... But we don't advertise all of Puppys use cases very well to:

- all the font end web devs who need their JS build tools to run fast as possible
- all the gamers that want a fast, lightweight linux gaming distro
- all the app developers that wanna compile things fast as possible
- all the designers who run slow/intensive video editors etc
- all the musicians who wants fastest possible, low latency music distros
- all the users who just stick to XFCE no matter what
- all the users who just stick to GNOME no matter what
- all the non experts, who like simplicity, lovely visuals (nice site, nice GUIs)
- all the mac users who like it only for its sleek, minimalist desktop styles
- all the millions of people who want a beautiful, easy distro that works on mediocre hardware
- etc

We never really advertise Puppy to them, we hardly document all the use cases for puppy ... how its speed suits them ... how easy it is to tinker with.. how fast compilers run .. how quick they can get stuff done..

We barely mention the various Puplets on the main site.. Don't hardly advertise new releases, pick our releases by some totally random criteria that keeps forums members happy, but leaves everyone else clueless as to when/why this one is official and that one is not...

And no one noticed back when Puppy Arcade was bringing in more new puppy users than most other puplets and releases at the time, cos a fast gaming distro is always a popular option ... same thing with lowt3chs music offerings..

Great pups like peebees LXDE pups don't get the attention they deserve outside this forum, don't get equal footing on the site, etc .. by some weird logic about which are the "main" devs/releases..


Better Design

On this forum, we should think a lot more about people who have never tried Puppy before, and how our not-so-nice website, docs and JWM desktop look to those people, especially when compared to other distros/projects.

Even other distros, which are boring ubuntu clones (or whatever), offering nothing unique, and without all the cool features puppy has, are often more popular than Puppy, simply cos they have nicer sites, nicer GUIs, nicer docs, are on github, better dev-friendly repos, etc..

Compare a JWM desktop to a Mac OS desktop, and try to sell Puppy to a person whose a normal end-user ..

Apple spent millions on designers, and user testing to choose the themes and layout they did for Mac OS .. They came to the conclusions (and thus the designs) they did cos that is what people wanted... We can benfefit from all that hard work, by simply copying some basic design principles, decisions, etc.

The reason I pick Mac OS, is that under the hood it is in many ways more limited and less powerful than Linux .. yet it looks nice, is easy to use, so ... it's still very popular.. even though it's expensive ...

ElementaryOS devs realised this... look how well they've done, just by making their own nice-looking Vala GTK apps.. Puppy can do Vala GTK apps too you know

Better project management

Seeing design points above, .. if we had better site, separate repos for our puppy-specific apps, nice docs, then better devs than us, who acyually know C, GTK+, Vala etc, would join us and help make puppy even better...

Most Puppy users and even devs refuse to get involved in anything Git or GitHub, which hampers development massively - the alternative methods of software development are rubbish in comparison (sharing zip files on forums ,for example!)

Currently, even Puppy many devs hardly ever contribute to other open source projects, to get puppy listed in those projects.. we could (but never do) update the docs of popular linux programs to include installation instructions for Puppy .. Pkg helps with this

The main site doesn't even use HTTPS, even tho it uses Jekyll and is (presumably) hosted on GitHub... Without HTTPS, many users will get warning from their browser, telling them NOT to visit the site. It's such a bad look... so amateur..

Puppy specific projects and apps like Pmusic and others don't even have a GitHub repo, so it's nearly impossible for multiple people to work in it .. We lose devs and great code cos of this..

Also, there is inconsistency between even official releases - some have kernel features the others don' (decent joypad support for example), and there is literally NO checklist in place for a Puppy to be considered "ready" for official release ...

This can leave users downloading a new Puppy, finding it a pain to setup in some basic way (cos bluetooth or gamepad or 3d gfx support was left out), then moving straight on to another distro which always has it..

Conclusion:

From the outside it can seem all so sporadic, ad-hoc, random, home-made, inconsistent, hit-and-miss, amaterish...

We really should think more about how Puppy looks to those not yet familiar with it, and how we encourage them to get involved...

We lose so many great devs to lack of good tooling (no CLI pkg manager, for example), confusion and lack of visibility.. and so many end-users cos puppy is relatively ugly, compared to their preferred distros..

Some solutions:

- take a leaf out of elementaryOS, , Deepin, Porteus and Alpine Linux projects (all grew very quickly indeed)
- copy nice designs, themes, layouts from other places.. stand on the shoulders of giants and all that..
- we need a better website, nicer looking... on HTTPS!
- regular, official releases.. (once a year seems like a reasonable rate to me)
- each official releases to be released in multiple flavours: JWM, LXDE and XFCE (or whatever)
- all official releases to have certain features/packages guaranteed working: bluetooth often doesn't work, even on official pups!
- puppy apps to have their own github or gitlab repos, so its easier for large teams to work on them
- stop bundling cut-down, half-boken GTK, Python and Perl packages - Puppy is such a pain for a programmer to setup various things which work right away in other distros, all so we can save 5mb in the ISO .. it costs hours of dev time!

Also

- a proper online list all puplets, especially very specific ones (music, gaming, video editing, etc)


...just a thought/rant.. don't be offended, ignore it if u like..

I think you're saying we need to drag Puppy, kicking, biting & scratching, into the modern world by the scruff of its neck....

Of course, you do realize that no matter how hard you try, you will never, ever turn Puppy into a 'mainstream' distro, don't you? We've got an uphill struggle on our hands, what with Pup having gained a long-standing reputation for being 'peculiar'.....and that's before you take into account all the veteran Linux geeks who look down their noses at Pup as though they've got summat nasty stuck to the bottom of their shoe.....

And, at the end of the day, like tends to seek out like. Guys like yourself, who can probably write (and think!) in code as naturally as most of the rest of us breathe (don't get me wrong; I'm envious, though I have neither the time nor the inclination to learn such stuff), of course you'll enjoy talking to other devs, and 'picking each other's brains', as it were. That's totally natural; it's human nature to want to share that kind of stuff. I understand where you're coming from.

But those are some big ideas.....not all of which are going to be easy to implement. You're going to have to get a lot of folks 'excited' about what you're proposing to garner the kind of help such an undertaking is going to need....

I wish you luck, I really do. I'm not as much of a stick-in-the-mud as I may appear to be, y'know. (BTW, I see what you were talking about with the 'handbook' idea. Documentation automation, to get a consistent look & feel across the kennels. Yah; good idea. I confess, when it comes to 'web stuff', I get lost very, very quickly. The whole thing is like so much Greek to me...I don't understand it at all. 'Markdown'....'CSS style sheets'....'javascript'....huh?? Wazzat?)

You're in for a long, slow, uphill slog, I suspect.....


Mike.

I'm not talking about turning Puppy into a mainstream distro.. Just one that isn't dying a slow death. It could so easily be more popular.

To boil it down, it simply amounts to:

- documenting what Puppy is good at (works on crap hardware, fast gaming, fast compiling, etc)

- cut out the old-school, ugly designs, replace with popular alternatives

- releases with modern desktop environments instead of JWM

- copying popular design decisions (icon themes, gtk themes, etc)

- copying sensible design/architecture decisions (separation of CLI and GUI, etc)

- offering a choice of desktop environments for each official release

- make releases with more native packages, fewer cut-down alternatives

- stop obsessing over saving 2 MBs at the cost of packages working from the repos

- a simple checklist to be ticked off before considering an official release "ready"

- a nice, clear, simple, modern looking website

- puppy devs learn to use repos for their apps

.. all of these are pretty easy to achieve, and would make puppy more popular... it doesn't have to be "perculiar" to retain all its coolest features.

Most of it involves simply stop making ugly apps and websites, then a couple of BOG-STANDARD dev practices - like using Git for programs being developed, so that lots of people can contribute to it and help out..

And "veteran linux geeks" as you put it wouldn't turn their noses up at Puppy so quick if it wasn't so perculiar .. Maybe some would be interested enough to help improve it - if we didn't have so many hacky, JWM-intangled scripts, for example..

It's not rocket science.

It's not rocket science.

Uhh, you kind of describe it as it is...
Start with clearing up all the doubles in menus, and for example remove all references and links to installation with grubdos in a 64-bit Puppy menu! Which doesn't work. Too many confusing things for a newbie.
And besides, jwm is great!

If you get new Puppy users by telling them that in contrast to Windoze, they can set up their Puppy exactly as they want to; we need all variants of wm's and other programs to choose from. That group of users are the advanced ones, they can fix any Puppy to their liking, forget them!

If the newbies are those who only have seen a Windoze from the outside, know nothing about file structures or partitioning - and probably gives a sh.. about it to start with, their need is a different one. Maybe some kind of modular Puppy which they can step right into, which works right away with net and browser and the possibility to edit and run all their old Windoze files and connections, and then only slowly let them discover the possibilities a Puppylinux gives them.
That is what I think.

tallboy wrote:And besides, jwm is great!

In your opinion..

What you mean to say is "choice is great"

Puppy ties users in to JWM to often, in too many ways.

Users who don't like JWM and see it as a 90s ugly WM, that is not even standards compliant, disagree..

They would definitely prefer the choice of official Puppy releases that didn't have it.

(Full disclosure, I like JWM + Rofi, cos I don't care about how anything looks, but most people are not like that).

My original point is that we shouldn't care so much about what we, the converted Puppy fans want... We should care more about those who haven't tried Puppy or don't like it say about it - listen to them, and try to improve Puppy and win them over.

Before any promotion is done, the first thing should be for the woof-CE devs to rein in
the trolls in their mist when someone comes up with:
-- an alternative approach to Puppy
-- a criticism they do not understand
-- an inconsistency they did not catch in their process.

Else that promotion will rest on quicksand and ultimately be useless.

@ sc0ttman:-

"- cut out the old-school, ugly designs, replace with popular alternatives

- releases with modern desktop environments instead of JWM

- copying popular design decisions (icon themes, gtk themes, etc)"

Mmmm....

All of which will end up adding a lot of 'weight'.....though I have to agree with you on one thing. And that is, that the days of everything being as lightweight as possible are kinda getting near retirement. I mean, the kind of hardware that was around when Puppy first appeared has pretty well been 'pensioned-off' by now. By today's standards, even 'crap' hardware has at least a dual-core, a fair chunk of RAM, decent storage.

But it sounds like you want Puppy to embrace Gnome, XFCE (eeurgh!), etc, etc. All the 'normal' file-managers. 'Full' compatibility with the 'big boy's' repos. Ability to simply install the latest Snap or Flatpak at a click, instead of 'farting around' to get things working. Etc. Etc....

Like I said, you want Puppy to become a 'clone' of everything else out there.

I would dispute that the mainstream distros look particularly 'nice' to begin with. TBH, if ya want 'bland', well, fine.....not my cuppa tea though. (Take this 'Yaru' theme that Canonical are wetting their knickers over for 18.10.....oh Lord, it's so plain. I mean, there's 'subtle', and then, well....) Yeah, drop the 'ugly' designs by all means, and add all that fancy Compiz crap, if that's what you want. But it all adds a shit-load of extra weight, and you're then raising Puppy up to near the size of much larger distros, y'know? You're pretty well mandating the requirement of more powerful hardware simply to be able to run Pup at all...

Not everybody is fortunate enough to be in that position.

I know what it is. You're looking at the overall way in which some of the bigger distros present themselves, and you're thinking to yourself, "They can do it. Why shouldn't we? We're just as capable..."

Anyway, appearance and this general emphasis you seem to be placing on 'niceness', it's all very much in the eye of the beholder. 'One man's meat', and all that. What you call 'nice', someone else might take one look at and think 'I'm gonna be sick.....*bleearghh*'

I don't know as I'd call the website 'ugly'. What are you basing that comment on, hmm? Or are you thinking of some of the fancy slide-in/out/up/down, fade-in/out effects that more sites seem to be employing nowadays?

I also don't know as 'nice' and 'clean, simple design' would in fact attract any more people than it does now. I kinda get the impression that some of what attracts folks to Puppy in the first place IS its 'quirkiness', y'know?

You could debate this all night, if you give into it. Anyway, I thought you were 'in' with the devs, no? Wouldn't it make more sense to go and knock some heads together over at Github? Most of 'em don't come anywhere near the Forum, from what I can see of it, so posting here about it isn't going to achieve much in the way of action. It'll probably get a discussion going among the membership, I'll grant you that.....but will it make anything happen?

Most of the 'ordinary' membership aren't really in a position to do much about any of this, are they?

(*shrug*)


Mike.

some of the ideas will run into conflict with the core principles of Puppy Linux being able to run on older hardware and to run very fast. The more eye candy that adds bloat. with more CPU demands and more RAM will be required.

The reason JWM is used even with some shortcomings is it is light weight and remains among the lightest that still does window management well.

Most of the GUI side of Puppy Linux is simply an interface for easily running a command line program.

There are some good looking themes and desktops out there but these programs require a fairly weighty list of dependencies and isn't Puppy Linux's strength lay also with the fact it can be installed on a 1 gigabyte ( or less) USB stick for example and still run very well

I do develop with Puppy Linux as the host...not that easy but if one wants it to run just like Ubuntu why not just use Ubuntu?

I think there would be an overall drop in performance when running a fully loaded "Ubuntu-sized" Puppy Linux on former Windows XP or Windows 7 machines and would land Puppy Linux right the middle of mediocrity in the land of fancy OS's.

It seems those who come to use or find Puppy Linux are those who are looking for exactly what Puppy Linux offers and found it.

I can agree better documentation and consolidated collections and repositories of ideas, methods and programs written and created for all the many Puppy Linux variations in existence would be a solid good thing


one of the strongest abilites Puppy Linux has is it is very fast on older hardware and ridiculously fast on newer modern machines


_

For promotion, we need money -- which we don't have.

Better Advertising

Puppy Linux
This message Sponsored by Cool Cats


Believe it or not (and I certainly don't) I am publicity officer for Puppy.
I used to do a daily newsletter, irregular podcasts, that sort of thing.

Now of course, like everything, change is happening ...
advertising by word of cybermouth, actual mouth, disinformation, Twatter, Fakebook, e-male, unsocial media
and of course, ... etc ...

It's all in your head, Lobster!!!

rockedge wrote:some of the ideas will run into conflict with the core principles of Puppy Linux being able to run on older hardware and to run very fast. The more eye candy that adds bloat. with more CPU demands and more RAM will be required.

The reason JWM is used even with some shortcomings is it is light weight and remains among the lightest that still does window management well.

Most of the GUI side of Puppy Linux is simply an interface for easily running a command line program.

There are some good looking themes and desktops out there but these programs require a fairly weighty list of dependencies and isn't Puppy Linux's strength lay also with the fact it can be installed on a 1 gigabyte ( or less) USB stick for example and still run very well
_

I prefer puppy the way it is (e.g. JWM is my preferred windows manager) but at the same time I think all the suggestions in the original post are good ideas. The important thing to note in the original post is that it said to offer flavors with different window managers. With this approach people wanting a lighter release can use the JWM version.

Other suggestions mentioned in the original post such as"
1 - better separation between gui and cli.
2. - better documentation
I think are quite important.

So with this is mind, we can aspire to most if not all the things in the original post but will there be the resources to implement all these things.

musher0 wrote:Before any promotion is done, the first thing should be for the woof-CE devs to rein in
the trolls in their mist when someone comes up with:
-- an alternative approach to Puppy
-- a criticism they do not understand
-- an inconsistency they did not catch in their process.

Else that promotion will rest on quicksand and ultimately be useless.

I suppose that's another complication!

sc0ttman wrote: - we need a better website, nicer looking... on HTTPS!

I agree on the https front. As far as websites go, I like simple. Nice looking often means more bloated!

- regular, official releases.. (once a year seems like a reasonable rate to me)
- each official releases to be released in multiple flavours: JWM, LXDE and XFCE (or whatever)

agreed, provided developers have the resources to do this.

- all official releases to have certain features/packages guaranteed working: bluetooth often doesn't work, even on official pups!

Wouldn't this be nice! However, given the amount of changes happening on woof-CE in comparison to the number of developers, this problem may plauge us for a while.

- puppy apps to have their own github or gitlab repos, so its easier for large teams to work on them

Agreed.

- stop bundling cut-down, half-boken GTK, Python and Perl packages

Sort of agree here except for the fact that python and Perl both have versions distinct enough to almost be their own language. Actually perl considers later versions of Perl to be a separate language than the earlier version of Perl. Regarding GTK, I don't know enough about the issues here.

Perhaps for python 2, it might be best to adopt pypy as a replacement for the official python 2 and use python 3 as the main python going forward.

- Puppy is such a pain for a programmer to setup various things which work right away in other distros, all so we can save 5mb in the ISO .. it costs hours of dev time!

Also

- a proper online list all puplets, especially very specific ones (music, gaming, video editing, etc)


...just a thought/rant.. don't be offended, ignore it if u like..

I suppose it depends how may 5mb units we save. If we do this once then sure, but if we do this many times perhaps it adds up to a lot.

As I said...

musher0 wrote:For promotion, we need money -- which we don't have.

You're just a bunch of idealists!
Head in the clouds, feet not touching ground!!!

How about someone starts a fund raising campaign on some social media
to collect money in order to promote Puppy decently?

BFN

I've skim read this post - but will add my 2 cents worth...

Puppy is designed to run on older hardware. But, the definition of older hardware for most people is only a couple of years old.
Rather than saying Puppy revives your old hardware, it could be rephrased to say Puppy more efficiently uses your existing hardware, even if it is a decade old.

Puppy's home is this forum. This forum is kinda broken. No https which probably isn't a real problem, but creates issues for some people. More importantly, you cannot join the forum using GMAIL. About the most popular email provider out there. Gmail doesn't deliver the user account confirmation email.

Size is a key important factor in defining Puppy. BUT, as with age, size is subjective. Puppy used to be 80MB, now it is closer to 300MB. Win10 is 10000MB. Ubuntu is 2000MB. With space that is cheap, broadband almost the world over, size is less of a constraint. Granted keeping programs small helps with the efficiency of the products, but it also means corners are cut at times. If someone isn't as willing to deal with it, then a cut corner is a fault and becomes a deal breaker. Adding a few extra MBs can mean more drivers, more hardware support, more prettiness etc (potentially a slippery slope)

p310don wrote:Size is a key important factor in defining Puppy. BUT, as with age, size is subjective. Puppy used to be 80MB, now it is closer to 300MB. Win10 is 10000MB. Ubuntu is 2000MB. With space that is cheap, broadband almost the world over, size is less of a constraint. Granted keeping programs small helps with the efficiency of the products, but it also means corners are cut at times. If someone isn't as willing to deal with it, then a cut corner is a fault and becomes a deal breaker. Adding a few extra MBs can mean more drivers, more hardware support, more prettiness etc (potentially a slippery slope)

I think that's the crux of it. For any given change it is easy to justify but if we do this enough then what does it add up to?

I totally understand people wanting Puppy to remain small ... And it would..

No one is suggested huge amounts of "bloat"... or any bloat..

Just that we try to use repo packages more often, instead of custom, cut-down, half-broken packages ... so that more apps work from the repos "out of the box", for end-users.. Fatdog already did it, cos it was/is a good idea..

No one is advocating for Puppy to be a clone of the big boys, or for it to stop working on the hardware it currently supports - as long as it's built with Woof, it will never be anything like the big boys, always much smaller.

For example, no doubt some of the crustier users here think that GTK3 is "bloat"... But without GTK3, you miss out on most of the best Linux programs that are out there.. So it's not really "bloat" these days, even it if used to be..

And we already have LXDE pups that remain MUCH, MUCH more lightweight than LXDE ubuntu etc.. And XFCE pups that a much more lightweight than other XFCE distros...

We already achieved it 10 times over ... Why are people ignoring this fact and moaning about ISO size just because of a DE?

People on this forum seem to be under the totally misguided impression that it's JWM/ROX that makes puppy lightweight and fast and makes it work on older hardware... it's not..

It can still be very lightweight, even with a modern desktop environment, a decent file manager that actually hooks up to network shares in a standards compliant way, etc...

Jemimah, Geoffrey etc did it with Saluki, no one moaned at them - it was a fast, lightweight, beautiful version of puppy that put many others to shame in terms of usability.

Again let me be clear - I use JWM + ROX + ROFI.. three ugly, old-school looking things, but i'm very happy with it... But, many other distro users would not be..

And I know beauty is in the eye of beholder ... Which is why I suggested more choice...

XFCE, LXDE, IceWM can all be beautiful, and we already have lots of lightweight pups that use them..

Offering these desktop environments as choices is obviously gonna be better than only offering JWM, or only offering XFCE, for example...

--

Nothing I'm suggesting is that hard, or even a big change ... it just amounts to being better organised and having a proper checklist to tick off when we get around to official releases..

On that checklist should be stuff like:

- has working bluetooth
- has working SAMBA
- has working OpenGL/DRI
- has working joypad support
- filemanager works with network shares
- the following repo packages work when installed:

• * ulauncher (tests python and GTK)
  * vlc (tests codecs, ffmpeg, Qt, etc)
  * 0.A.D (tests OpenGL)
  * freeciv (tests SDL, etc)

- etc

And also compiling a couple of different desktop environments for each official release (which usually happens anyway, but after the release, and so it stays limited to the forums)..

---

I am not advocating we get rid of the lightweight aspects of Puppy.. Just that we de-couple JWM and ROX from the system scripts, so that making different flavours with different desktop environments is much easier.

And that we de-couple GUIs from their actual programs - instead of the TERRIBLE practice of bundling apps all together in some Gtkdialog-requiring blob... such bad practise it's unreal - it removes the power of the Puppy CLI, and makes it seems like a toy, not a real OS..

It ridiculous that users cannot automate all kinds of things in puppy, simply cos the CLI tools are not there ... Instead you have to boot it all the way to desktop, manually click around ... This is not re-producible, cannot be automated, cannot be tested... cannot be hooked up to scripts.. In short, gtkdialog apps that dont offer CLI interfaces are WAY less powerful, and make Puppy less powerful..

---

And about "advertising" being expensive... It's FREE to do the following:

- submit reviews of the latest puppy to your fave tech blogs
- add Puppy to installation instructions of popular linux programs (kodi, vlc, etc)
- do Pull Requests on GitHub programs and awesome list, to add Puppy there
- post to social media about puppy linux
- get on reddit, etc, and post about Puppy for specific users (gamers, etc)
- do reviews and send them to magazine to post (they are happy to receive free content, and just post what u give them most of them time)
- youtube videos showing of the unique puppy features

musher0 is totally wrong .... Back when I made Puppy Arcade, I simply submitted about 5 articles/reviews tha I wrote myself to various online magazines and blogs - ALL of them printed it and thanked me for doing thir work for them.. For about 2 years I was getting like 20 emails a week about Puppy Arcade - FROM PEOPLE WHO HAD NEVER PREVIOUSLY USED LINUX, let alone puppy

And BTW, I made Puppy Arcade before I was a Puppy user proper... I came from a windows background, looking for a faster OS to play games on ... Puppy fitted the bill, I knew others would want a retro gaming OS that runs in RAM, so I downloaded Puppy (having never used it before) and starting to learn shell script..

No one on this forum even noticed that for about 2 years, Puppy Arcade was bringing in more new Puppy users than almost any other puplet/release... Go back and look at the puppy arcade threads - lots and lots of new users doing their first post...

Advertising is free, not expensive.

mavrothal wrote:Puppy hardly qualifies nowadays for professional use or as a data safebox for the person next door. Is more of a portable or rescue OS to help the person next door…

Beyond that is rather a handy OS for novice (or more experienced) hackers and tinkerers (easy to repair/recover, shell script based OS)
Let’s enjoy it for what it is!

Don't get me wrong, I love Puppy...

But to plan to limit it to a toy OS or a rescue OS is silly..

It can be SO much more than that ..

For example, Lakka (et al) are distros focused on retro gaming ... and VERY popular... much more popular than puppy...

Yet... Lakka is basically just ubuntu + retroarch + emulation station (2 packages!)

Puppy can EASILY be made to have retroArch and EmulationStation (like Lakka)... And it would seem almost exactly the same, but Puppy will be easier to install, faster to run and wouldnt even need its own partition...

All we would need is decent joypad support (for xbox pads, ps3 pads, etc) in the kernel, 3d gfx enabled, and it's a good 'un...

Likewise... for the Kodi-focused distros that offer themselves as up media centers .. Puppy can EASILY do that too .. And its easier to remaster a puppy than with other distros..


In other words:

We can easily match very popular distros out there, feature for feature... There is no reason to see Puppy as a lame duck, or rescue OS only, or stuck in the past.

@ sc0ttman:-

sc0ttman wrote:XFCE, LXDE, IceWM can all be beautiful, and we already have lots of lightweight pups that use them..

Oi! Scotty..! JWM can be beautiful, too, y'know....

[Click to enlarge...]








Mike.