Making porteus better: what is your wishlist

[francois]

According to your experience with porteus, given that you would like to make porteus better, what would be your wishlist? You can propose major improvements, but for sure targeting KISS type of improvements will give more chances to your dreams to come to life.

Newcomers advice are peculiarly sollicited.

[nanZor]

Incorporate more of the latest busybox, but still keeping an eye out not to bloat in either creeping featurism, or major changes in iso size. (I can get 3.8gb of unnecessary data from Knoppix anyday.)

My love of Porteus stems from this as a basic ideal. Making the most out of available resources. Since we're using some of it anyway, can we incorporate more of it? Don't laugh - I still use copy / cat / herefiles, and yes, even the ED editor to get my internal ken going. Won't add much.

Note to devs - don't lose hope or inspiration. I can see where supporting such a project after a long time might become the same old thing day after day, but perhaps there is a non-vocal majority who absolutely love what you are doing. I know I do.

DOCS - docs are available and in the usual places. But if there's a writer out there, something similar to this like TinyCore pdf / book has would rock - and yes, some info is stale, but nonetheless:

https://distro.ibiblio.org/tinycorelinux/book.html

I see a self-publishing opportunity for a good writer here with Porteus. Personally a "dead tree" edition would suit me fine - they never fail to wakeup from suspend.

[nanZor]

Maybe a more pertinent question is:

WHAT IS THE DEV'S WISHLIST ?

You guys have supported this project for so many years, and with a very unique "distro" if you want to call it that. Maybe it's time to return the favor:

What as a dev turns you on - keeps your interest? I see a lot of "contributed" work going on, has any of that trickled into Porteus proper, or is time for a new direction, without dismantling the team as a whole in the process?

The last thing I'd hate to see is what has happened to some other distros where the initial enthusiasm is gone, and the project just fades.

Is there something fresh - a new outlook you want to explore and have us follow? I'm not advocating any changes, but just saying that I'd hate to be using Porteus if I knew it was turning more into a job, or boring task.

Do polls even mean anything these days? Are they useful, or just more noise than signal? Would anyone get some hurt feelings, or do we have just a little bit of skin in a media that has no body language. Well, other than the ton of emoji's to the right of me....

[manu]

I have been following up with the cool progress of our beloved distribution. It's fast, it is beautiful and it is configurable.

What I miss is, apt like out of the box package manager functionality, which would wrap the 'packaging for Porteus' commands over to a server backend and allow downloading a composed module. A sequence of actions like :
1. user gives the command to download a package.
2. the script connects to a distributed set of servers and searches for the package
3. the package is built for Porteus and is downloaded.

Everything is configurable but it does make me pull my hairs out sometimes. Everything is available on G Suite or Office 365. Hence Porteus must evolve. I am thinking of a web-based interface, instead of a pen boot.

[francois]

Hello manu. If you are in to build the thing, I will be testing. Have you worked with USM? Have you worked with slackware the basic distribution?

[manu]

Hello manu. If you are in to build the thing, I will be testing. Have you worked with USM? Have you worked with Slackware the basic distribution?

Looks cool! If there are more thinking heads, it can be nicer.
Though my first experience was with Suse Linux 6.2 something, an old YaST ... very old times.
I did use USM(thanks for pointing it gently) - and it solves the problem - however a slightly cumbersome way. If I am not wrong the only way if you need a package and its not available.

Everyone is going the 64bit route, it's going a bit worrisome future for 32 bit.
Downloading a complete Porteus distro - with the required packages would be nicer!

Please note that I have my thinking cap on!

[Kulle]

My wish: snapd or flatpak

[M. Eerie]

I'd love something like MATE-HUD functionality

Peek seems handy too. Makes easy to show others how to do things (i.e. teaching others to do some black magic for beginners/intermediate users like me)

[ncmprhnsbl]

Peek seems handy too. Makes easy to show others how to do things (i.e. teaching others to do some black magic for beginners/intermediate users like me)

here ya go: bundle - Peek for Porteus 5.0rc1

[M. Eerie]

Awesome

[M. Eerie]

I'm missing gnome-disk-utility (preferred) / gparted
grsync
and a cloud service, speaking of what... I think a common cloud storage mirroring for skeleton, kernels and base modules would be fine, making users import to their account, should it be the same...

MEGAcmd anyone?

[francois]

porteus is a very small print distro. This is why you do not get so much packages stock.

gparted comes stock with xfce. On other desktop, usm will build it easily.

For the cloud service openbox is also easy to install, usm.

[M. Eerie]

Yes, you're right.