When did this puplet graduate to XFCE?

[houndstooth]

@dimkr I see there was a big distro size jump in v 9.3.0. Is that XFCE?

Also wondering how long it has supported Bluetooth.

All I see in Mainline is Janky Bluetooth & I am scared.

Thanks

[dimkr]

Vanilla Dpup is big because:
1. It includes support for languages other than English (remove the nlsx SFS if you don't need this)
2. It includes documentation like man pages (remove the docx SFS if you don't need this)
3. It includes ~100 MB of firmware - many Puppy releases ship with the drivers for common WiFi adapters, but without the firmware
4. It includes VA API drivers for GPU-accelerated video decoding - a must have if you want to watch online videos without overheating and battery drain with some laptops
5. It includes extra fonts to cover many languages, box drawing characters and even emojis: websites look normal, they way they look on major distros like Ubuntu, and text is readable
6. It includes Firefox, which is by far the biggest package
7. It includes things like Blueman, which pull in big dependencies like Python ... but IMO, a distro without basics like proper Bluetooth audio support is useless
8. The kernel is almost identical to the Debian kernel, so hardware support should be great
9. All SFSs are compressed with zstd and not with xz - they're 8-12% bigger than normal but CPU consumption is much lower and applications start quickly
10. Many applications are up-to-date: you're getting the latest Transmission, gparted (...) and not years old versions

If you replace fdrv with a small one (like the one you can find in S15Pup), remove nlsx, remove docx and so on, Vanilla Dpup is only slightly bigger than "official" Puppy. But even if you don't remove anything, RAM and CPU consumption should be relatively low.

If you want xfce, apt update && apt install xfce4 && echo xfce4-session > /etc/windowmanager.

And don't be scared.

[mikewalsh]

@dimkr :-

Dima.....point 5. About the fonts. Sorry to drag this "off-topic", but.....would you happen to know what it is that usually causes font issues with Puppy when running stuff as user spot?

I've had the issue for years - usually with browsers - that if I want to download or upload something, and the file-chooser gets brought up, all I can see is a load of little square boxes. Obviously, it's a missing font, I get that.....but which one?

It's a PITA, because I can't read what's there, so I don't know what on earth I'm doing! I've asked about this a few times over the years, but never had a satisfactory answer. Where would you put fonts for "spot" to be able to access them?

Bear in mind this mainly seems to happen with older Puppies. More recent Pups, like Bionic (or newer), have never had this problem....

I'd love to be able to lay this to rest once and for all.

Mike.

[houndstooth]

but IMO, a distro without basics like proper Bluetooth audio support is useless

Bluetooth support on new devices is essential & can be a deal-breaker function, unless someone wants to boot distros like they hop browsers.

I have never booted Vanilla but I can read sharpness & order in your thinking.

For some reason I was thinking you graduated to XFCE.

I have installed XFCE from repositories before but it requires expertise to make a highly functional distro.

[peebee]

If you replace fdrv with a small one (like the one you can find in S15Pup)

For info:
this no longer applies to Github built S15Pups as they "inherit" the fdrv from the kernel-kit (c. 64MB / 75MB) and there seems no way to overwrite this with the smaller 20MB fdrv which can be provided in local builds.