Puppy Linux Discussion Forum

Here if someone writes, "This is my customized Puppy Precise, my main distro" no one will grudge them unless they start complaining about something not working the rest of us can use. STILL, someone will try to help them anyway, taking it as a technical challenge.

There is also the pressure to keep current to stay in tune with other users and kick the tires on new technology.

But when the pressure isn't paychecks, it's different.

JASpup wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 1:25 am

Do users update their WinOS beyond the service packs & auto updates, or do they just buy a new machine?

I never have, though I'd been wrestling with XP on an old 98 box months back.

I think that's the capital point.

Gates' social contribution dwarfs his wealth.

You need Windows 11 because time is passed & profits are demanded.

That’s a threat to “national security”, I mean “our freedom”.

We’re being dictated from when to pause and update, stop and restart, to when to buy a new computer.

sonny wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 1:41 am

That’s a threat to “national security”, I mean “our freedom”.

We’re being dictated from when to pause and update, stop and restart, to when to buy a new computer.

Most of my online social network is non-technical people & I don't know how to impress upon them these issues without being off-putting.

One just posted about a LinkedIn hack.

If I mention Puppy the theme & novelty might make an impression, but if they only knew of the other reasons to use Linux and maintain vigilance.

The path is still enticing new users without encumbering them with a technical albatross I believe.

Puppy is powerful but it needs some work on the look and feel, if we also care for the people on the other side of the kennels; those who don't know the difference between hard drive and memory, etc etc.
I wish to see Puppy to score high on both category: the most powerful and the easiest to use.

sonny wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 2:45 am

Puppy is powerful but it needs some work on the look and feel, if we also care for the people on the other side of the kennels; those who don't know the difference between hard drive and memory, etc etc.
I wish to see Puppy to score high on both category: the most powerful and the easiest to use.

It already exists in the Linux world...

sonny wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 1:41 am

That’s a threat to “national security”, I mean “our freedom”.

We’re being dictated from when to pause and update, stop and restart, to when to buy a new computer.

I wholeheartedly agree, sonny. Our freedoms are being threatened. Wake up America!

CaptGeorge wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 4:02 am

sonny wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 1:41 am

That’s a threat to “national security”, I mean “our freedom”.

We’re being dictated from when to pause and update, stop and restart, to when to buy a new computer.

I wholeheartedly agree, sonny. Our freedoms are being threatened. Wake up America!

Aye aye, Captain ...

Happy 4th to my compatriots at the kennels!

JASpup wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 1:25 am

Do users update their WinOS beyond the service packs & auto updates, or do they just buy a new machine?

This depends doesn't it? Each windows release they try to support 'enough' existing users' hardware, and 'most' of those users will update to the new version.

Win11 seems likely to have more hold-outs though, due to:-
- the promise they made that Win10 would be the last windows
- meeting the hardware requirements seems expensive relative to the new features
- Covid and the general economy massively hitting disposable income in these years
- the mistake a few years ago of trying to push Win10 onto Win7 users without choice via the update service
- general resentment of the telemetry and needing Microsoft.com logins to use Teams, open encrypted emails from their healthcare service, etc, etc

To try and match this level of mis-marketing, Puppy could:-

- upgrade all users' existing Puppy installations to 64-bit Fossa (even if it won't work)
- put the xfce Panel by default in the middle of the screen (and remove the option of hiding it)
- charge a significant license fee every time someone shares a .pet file on the forum
- require all pc logins to authenticate via the forum
- delete the old forum and say "support is discontinued"

Migration of users from Windows won't be a mass exodus but will benefit all Linuxes, and I guess it's about targeting the other OS' concerns and annoyances

PuppyandCo wrote: ↑Sun Jul 04, 2021 2:18 pm

To try and match this level of mis-marketing, Puppy could:-

- upgrade all users' existing Puppy installations to 64-bit Fossa (even if it won't work)
- put the xfce Panel by default in the middle of the screen (and remove the option of hiding it)
- charge a significant license fee every time someone shares a .pet file on the forum
- require all pc logins to authenticate via the forum
- delete the old forum and say "support is discontinued"

Very well put, that's a brilliant comparison. I decided some years ago that I was never going to buy another brand new pc. For the time being I've got enough laptops but when there comes a time I really need another I will look for a 2nd hand one, there are always plenty that suit my needs. As for Windows 11, forget it, no intention of going down that road. Despite Microsoft's best efforts to persuade me otherwise, I always resisted upgrading my Windows 7 laptop to Windows 10. Partly because all the pc's at my place of work are Windows 10, and let's just say our IT department are never short of work.

The Win 7 laptop is now 11 years old, still running Win 7, and there's nothing wrong with it. I don't try to fix things that aren't broken either. Regarding that mysterious thing called "progress", my first home pc was an XP desktop. What does Win 10 do that the old XP didn't? Ok, it's got a webcam, and it may be a bit more responsive (I should hope it is, it's got 16x more RAM!) but that's about it as far as I'm concerned. Yes Win 10 has loads more bells, whistles, and "features", but just how useful are they? Loads of stuff that people neither need nor want, but it's all adding to the resources required to run the machine.

To get more people to switch to Linux I'm afraid to say that in a lot of cases everything needs to be handed on a plate. Most of the apps needed to do the basic tasks have to be included at the start, and everything has to work straight out of the box. A lot of people just cannot be bothered to mess around with things, they just want to switch the pc on and use it. Installing some extra software, providing it's simple and straightforward to do, is about as far as some will go.

I NEVER get store-bought computers for my self or for my clients (never buy brand new).

I always buy "off-lease" computers (meaning: commercial grade) cuz store-bought is "home/student grade".

FYI, this is my go-to store. Browse, reserve, then pick up:

https://www.microcenter.com/search/sear ... y=pricelow

https://www.microcenter.com/search/sear ... y=pricelow

Downloaded the latest Dev -160 with updates and installed it on a 2.66ghz quadcore q9400 cpu, 4gb ram computer. The installation took about 23gb of drive space. This computer is certainly not state of the art, but it's also not slow even by today's standards. Boot time (without faststart) was about 80 seconds which is good. W11's performance could best be described as "sluggish", applications opened slowly and were not responsive. File transfers and communications with network shares were noticeably slow. Comparing W11 to W10 on the same computer, W10 wins.

Microsoft did hold true to their past annoying practice of renaming and reorganizing many of the configuration settings. Some are completely gone, some lost functionality, and they're not where they were in W10, "it's NEW because we made it harder to use (once again)". They have totally screwed up the right mouse click functions. One improvement I did find was in file associations, you can now select applications, including portable apps, that are not MS or that did not come from the MS store.

I did an internet search on "Windows 11 advantages" and found a site where the #1 pro was it had beautiful wallpaper (background). Number 2 was MS moved the taskbar start button and other icons to the center of the taskbar to make it look more like a dock. I think that kind of sums it up, that this version is more fluff than function.

MS is less than 60 days from their rumored launch date in October, they've got a lot work to do in my opinion. Luckily for those of us who have to work with Windows, Windows 10 will be supported until 2025.

Makes you love your puppy even more.

wizard

Last year I wiped all my machines clean of anything Windows. I have NOT missed it one bit. There's nothing I need to do work wise that can't be accomplished in puppy, jackalpup for me because I'm a musician/educator.

I use Windows10 machines in the work office at one of my jobs, I'm a piece-meal freelancer basically. I work with 5 organizations, two of them use Microsoft Teams. I never sign in, my activity always shows zip/nada/zilch in the 'briefing' that outlook365 sends every Monday.

This week starting the new school cycle, one my employers and I had a detailed email exchange about why I don't use Office365. I told them, I use an ungoogled android running Lineage O.S, I use email clients on Linux, vpn's and ungoogled browsers. I have 6 different email accounts with 5 separate organizations. I need everything in a lightweight, fast, efficient email client (Sylpheed-tried and true) I also explained that if Microsoft can't identify my browser, or device i.d. they go out of their way to make life difficult, and start asking me to prove I'm not a robot. Then my email stops loading they begin sending me notifications that 'Your organization requires you to verify your credentials.' I also explained that email is not rocket science, it's a technology that's been around 4 decades, and that grabbing my mail off outlook's server is as far as I'm willing to go with Microsoft. I told them that I have no problem with our team seeing my communications data, but I have a HUGE problem with microsoft's AI analyzing my communications and building a profile on me. I didn't sign up for that when I agreed to work contractually (though it's a great organization, doing meaningful work, and I've been with them 15 years.)

The following day I received a notice from my employer that they enabled email forwarding on my account. They must have seen that I had set it up that way, and it was previously prohibited. So I've been officially absolved of involuntary subservience to BIG TECH.

Mission Accomplished

But what I really wanted to say is this: I always got the impression that when Windows 10 started a 20 hour update process every few months, they were likely uploading every piece of relevant data on my hard drive, if not uploading a full-blown disk-image!

Can anyone confirm my suspicion?

@geo_c

Is your data relevant enough to undergo a 20 hour process from Microsoft? Most people who think they are out of digital danger because they use tools outside of those commonly used are generally on the same level as other people; bread, games, sex and fun. Stop worrying about these aspects ... focus on helping your neighbor! Exasperate by the paranos of this forum ...

BologneChe wrote: ↑Sat Aug 28, 2021 2:43 am

@geo_c

Is your data relevant enough to undergo a 20 hour process from Microsoft? Most people who think they are out of digital danger because they use tools outside of those commonly used are generally on the same level as other people; bread, games, sex and fun. Stop worrying about these aspects ... focus on helping your neighbor! Exasperate by the paranos of this forum ...

Well that's the point. Fighting my operating system that renders my computer useless for a 24 period, and spending an hour a day weeding through redundancy, logging into accounts supposedly for my 'convenience' doesn't help me do my job of inspiring, creating, and educating. Puppy does that.

I would never be so naive as to think that I'm 'hiding' from the NSA, Microsoft, or google. I'm simply ethically opposed to willingly becoming their 'product' for the sake of convenience, when their tools are anything but.

What I told my employer is basically I'm way too busy to participate in the 'info-tech' system they decided to implement. I choose to use effective tools, digital tools that accomplish the most tasks, the most efficiently, the most easily migrated, conveniently backed-up, and are the most enjoyable. They heard me, and I think we all win.

What I'm saying about the update is this: Does Microsoft engage their servers with my machine for 20 hours in order to give me a better experience? I don't think so. Call me old-fashioned, but I think of an operating system as a piece of software that gives me access to the capabilities of the hardware and my applications. Windows 10 is something else entirely. Which is sad, because it actually ran very smoothly (by windows standards) and was surprisingly fast, and really never crashed even though I ran very resource heavy audio software daily. But as it progressed, the benefits did not outweigh the headaches of forced updates, the inability to remove things like Cortana, which are RAM hogs, and their basic approach of 'owning' my device because their code is running on it. Their product inversely got as worse as it got better. That's always been my take on them. Though admittedly winXP was probably a bright spot in the MS corporate history. I ran a machine with XP until about 3 years ago. It literally held stable for 18 years, even after they had long stopped supporting it. But those days are no more.

I'm not paranoid. I don't believe my drive contents are of particular interest to most tech companies, but raw data seems to be a valuable commodity in this era. I'm not just handing it to a bunch of corporations that are at odds with my convictions. That's not paranoia, it's a value decision. I refuse to encourage the beast. Just my take on windows 10 and 11

The tide turned for me when Microsoft changed the language to:
Windows is a service.

Long ago in the days of Windows XP I started turning off Microsoft's control on my systems, beginning with automatic updates. They became more aggressive in Win7, and then when they changed their business model with Win10 they became intrusive and devious. I started out manually turning off their data gathering, but soon found that others had done the heavy lifting and created utilities that made it easy. Here are the tools I use to make using Windows bearable:

-stopupdates10portable.zip - does what the name implies, run it before ever connecting to the internet
-wpd - customize privacy related settings, complementary to dws
-dws - Destroy Windows 10 Spying, complementary to wpd

These programs have not been updated for Win11, but I have installed them and they are still effective.

If you want to confirm or reinforce your privacy run a program like fiddler, which is a web traffic monitor proxy that will show all your web connections. If you find suspicious connections you can add them to your host file or firewall. This was what I did when initially setting up Win10 and it has run without issues since 2015.

Last, I run my browsers in the program "Sandboxie" which isolates them from the main OS

wizard

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