Contemplations on Easy, Quirky, the forum, the future

Ruminating over where EasyOS is heading... I receive helpful advice, not just on the forum, but emails also. I do not think of Easy as ever being a mainstream Linux distribution, just a niche player. Furthermore, I am just doing what interests me. There is no master plan, no ambition for Easy to be widely adopted, I am just meandering along, having fun.

Easy is also a learning tool for me. Hence my implementation of Easy Containers, a grassroots container system, rather than using LXC, Docker, or whatever. Even though they may be considered "better" or "superior". KVM is another one, I might look at it, one day.

A couple of days ago, I communicated with 'rufwoof' (forum name) via email. He has provided helpful testing of the containers in Easy. However, he got banned from the forum, due to some heated exchanges. Hence, we resorted to emails.

What rufwoof objected to is the *Dog distributions, for example DebianDog. He considers them to be too un-Puppy-like to be using the Puppy Forum.

I have seen it happen many times on the forum. Spontaneous responses can wind up, become flame wars. Anyway, this question about the *Dogs...

Consider democracy and personal freedom in the USA, one might argue that it has tipped into chaos. A country full of criminals and neurotic people!

On the otherhand, diversity, what might seem like borderline chaos, might be a rich breeding ground for new ideas and growth. Or maybe not.

The diversity on the Puppy forum has been said to be confusing for newcomers. So, should the forum be reined in?

These are just my ruminations, I do not have admin rights on the forum, nor puppylinux.com or puppylinux.org. I retired from all of that, back in 2013.

Personally, I read bits and pieces from all over the forum, and find the diversity interesting and useful. Cross-pollination does happen. But, I do understand the counter-argument.

I am using the forum for EasyOS and Quirky Linux feedback. But what of the future? If Easy becomes more popular, I can see the argument in favour of a focused forum, EasyOS and nothing else, or maybe a special section for "off topic" or whatever.
So, it is on the cards, might start a new forum.

What about Quirky? One problem for me is that I take on too much. I am seriously considering dropping Quirky development, just keep Easy. Also, on PC platforms only support x86_64. Might add ARM boards, but maybe only aarch64.

Then there is the ability of woofQ to build a distro from binary packages from Ubuntu, Slackware, etc. I recently did a "Easy Beaver" build, but it was a lot of work, and there are still unresolved issues. As usual, I was disappointed by the bloat, the build was 480MB, and that is with far less apps than my Easy Pyro builds.

And, Ubuntu is forcing gtk3 onto me, which is one of my pet peaves.

So, I might focus on only building from packages compiled in my fork of OpenEmbedded. Although Easy Pyro has a small package respository, I can gradually build it up. Of course, it will never get anywhere near the size of the mainstream repos.

I must stress that these are just thoughts for now, not necessarily what will happen.

Tags: easy, quirky