My suggestions for F96-CE

[Luluc]

I hope you people don't mind a little constructive criticism. I swear it's in good faith.

This looks like a bug to me. It says, "Tick apps to run as spot." What apps? They seem to be missing. I also tried Fossapup95 yesterday and the selection of apps is there. F96 doesn't have it.
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I don't like the package installer.

1. It's confusing. I struggle to understand how to find a package. Most of my attempts fail. That might lead a novice to give up. I didn't give up because damn it, I know that package exists! So I clicked and clicked and tried multiple buttons and options until what I wanted showed up. But it wasn't very easy. I am not too sure of the difference between List packages and Refresh packages. I suspect there should be only Refresh, which would automatically List. That entry field does not react to Enter, I have to press the magnifying icon for it to work. That is counterintuitive.

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Also, see how the "All repositories" option disappears. So I have to search each one at a time?

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2. Installation options. All items have a green tick. My first reaction was to think that everything was selected and would be applied. But then I suspected that didn't make sense and decided I had to click ONE to apply ONE. Then again, I'm not really sure this is correct. What is the difference between Install and Force Install? Install without deps? Really? That is possible?! Convert: into what? Combine: what does that mean? And it seems that Add to Queue (Install) is just the same as install. And why am I not allowed to resize or maximize that widget? Why do I have to scroll within such a tiny window? Look at aaaaaaaaaaall the screen real estate I have around it. Why does it even have to be that small? I am focused on that one task. I don't need to look at anything else. It could take up the entire screen and actually make my life easier.

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Installation is done. But there is no indication of it. Unless I scroll inside the tiny window and see the output informing that it is done. Another button would be nice. A button that would display for example "Installing..." then change the text to "Done" and get focus so we could dismiss it with Enter or Space.

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This is an old Puppy problem. There are two frugal installers. Or are they three? I'll have to check back...

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Yes, there are "minimal frugal installer," "flexible frugal installer," and "Puppy installer." Confusing. They should probably be merged into one. The one I show above demands to change my grub. What if I don't want that? OK, one of the other installers will install without tampering with grub. But again, confusing.

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When I click this Themes button, I expect to choose and change my theme. But instead of that, I get a list that
1. Is useful how? Why?
2. Reveals a bit of a mess. Shouldn't everything be using one same theme?

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Fine-tuning the keyboard. "for this session only"? Why? What if I want that permanent?
(I know I can make them permanent with 'xset r rate 100 50' in .xinitrc. I don't expect answers to any of these questions. I am just exposing my thoughts as a reviewer.)

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I've changed the font size in GTK. But the menu font (far left) is still small. Where do I change that?
(OK, this time I would appreciate to have an answer.)

I hope nobody takes offense. Since development seems to be active with improvements being applied, I thought that the author might like a little input. These are just suggestions. Take them or leave them.

Thank you for all the fish!

[mikewalsh]

I've changed the font size in GTK. But the menu font (far left) is still small. Where do I change that?
(OK, this time I would appreciate to have an answer.)

Try Menu -> Desktop -> JWMDesk Manager -> Tab 'Menu'. This is where you change the Menu settings, though be warned; whilst this changes the spacing between lines in the Menu, it doesn't in fact change either the font OR the actual font size itself. Confused? Yeah, well; you're in good company.

A lot of Puppy oddities boil down to the fact that - with the exception of individual Puplets, where the conscious decision has been taken to use a 'proper' DE (Desktop Environment) - the traditional Puppy 'desktop' has been spun up out of a file manager extension (aka the ROX-filer 'pinboard') and an ultra-lightweight window manager (JWM). And this window manager is traditionally controlled by a bunch of XML text files.....

Menu font/font size is controlled by the /root/.jwm/jwmrc-theme file. Here, you can change menu appearance, 'theming' (I really hate that word), colors, fontsizes, tray settings - fonts, sizes, colors, no of virtual desktops in the 'pager', etc.......pretty much everything JWM offers.

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I guess you'd call me "old-school". Because I've been with Puppy long enough that I got used to modifying everything by editing text files, I actually find the GUI controls for much Puppy stuff to be rather confusing. By the time I've figured out how to do things via the GUI, I've already edited/applied the modification via text file, forgotten about it and long since moved on to doing something else. But that's just me....

(Mind you, having once taken the time to modify the ~/.jwm/jwmrc-theme file - including some time experimenting with colour hex codes to get exactly the colours/shades I wanted - I found some time ago that it can be swapped AND re-used, as-is, between multiple Puppies.Which saves me a bunch of work every time I set-up a new Pup, since I DO like consistency between my Pups (many of my older Puppies use the same, very neat dark GTK2 theme that I found over at Gnome-tweak.org a while back). The same goes for many JWM text control files; once set-up the way I want 'em, they're pretty much 100% interchangeable....)

(*shrug...*)

Mike.

[MochiMoppel]

I've changed the font size in GTK. But the menu font (far left) is still small. Where do I change that?

As Mike already suggested you'll have to edit the /root/.jwm/jwmrc-theme file manually. Unfortunately there is no GUI to make this change easier. When you are done you will have to run jwm -restart in a terminal.

Screenshot.png (149.58 KiB) Viewed 865 times

This looks like a bug to me. It says, "Tick apps to run as spot." What apps? They seem to be missing. I also tried Fossapup95 yesterday and the selection of apps is there. F96 doesn't have it.

Confirmed. It works correctly in Bookworm64 10.0.8 too, so you may well be looking at a

[rockedge]

This looks like a bug to me. It says, "Tick apps to run as spot." What apps? They seem to be missing. I also tried Fossapup95 yesterday and the selection of apps is there. F96 doesn't have it.

We'll have to look for the reason it's not working!

I thought it did at one time though I could be wrong about that. Some variable has an empty value during the app search function I would bet on..........

[ozboomer]

I'll add my two penn'orth into this..

This looks like a bug to me. It says, "Tick apps to run as spot." What apps? They seem to be missing. I also tried Fossapup95 yesterday and the selection of apps is there. F96 doesn't have it.

I've also observed that under 'some unspecified conditions' (too fiddly to identify), browsers will run as spot even though the 'QuickSetup' (that runs at first boot time) has the option unticked.. but having moved to the 'portable' Chrome these days (where I understand spot is used), it doesn't impact me that much.

I don't like the package installer.
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Snap (on the GUI-based 'Package Manager NG', that is).

The 'All' option (in the 'Repositories' pulldown) sometimes appears, sometimes it doesn't. The list of applications being displayed depends on whether the 'List' button has been pressed before or after the 'Refresh' button.. and subsequent searches will sometimes find things, sometimes not (even with the 'Settings' updated to 'All').

It's also annoying that the original PPM includes items that are not in the PPM-NG and vice-versa... so you always have to check both 'Legacy' and 'NG'. I haven't looked into their respective scripts, etc... but wouldn't it be helpful to the maintainers to have import/export options so the respective 'databases' could be interchanged, so a 'release' of 'Legacy' and 'NG' would only require a script to be run to update both databases..?

Also, to the point of the 'installation time' pop-up. IMO, it would be far better to have a 'real' dialog, with tickboxes, and tooltips so you could better understand the impact of selecting one and not the other. For the new user, it's not particularly clear, too, how the 'queueing' system works; that would almost justify its own dialog.

This is an old Puppy problem. There are two frugal installers. Or are they three? I'll have to check back...

I found this a bit until I read the docs for the 'family' of installers. I have limited use cases, I guess - I almost always use 'frugalpup' and haven't really had too much trouble. Very much a case of YMMV, methinks...

Fine-tuning the keyboard. "for this session only"? Why? What if I want that permanent?
(I know I can make them permanent with 'xset r rate 100 50' in .xinitrc.

Snap.

It's always bamboozled me a bit, about why you would set an option like this to the session only... and f'me, there's something awry somewhere, as whether I do the 'Ok' or the 'Apply', the next time I boot the frugal installation, the settings are frequently applied.. but occasionally, they won't have been remembered. I mainly modify the repeat delay, if there's something magical about that setting.

As always, there's a lot to love about our Puppies... but Dang! their idiosyncrasies can be annoying sometimes...