On Tue, July 21, 2020 9:42 am, Israel Dahl wrote: > Yeah, so lets focus on the operating system, if we cannot control > upstream kernel choices. Lets support it until we cannot. I think going > forward we need to at least think mobile application support (build in > screen size adjustment). This way if it runs on a 5 inch screen it works, > even if it isn't a mobile device.
Having done development for both desktop and mobile, I don't believe screen size is the biggest issue when porting between the systems. I believe the user input paradigm is much more of a problem. You're going from a desktop extreme where some user wants everything input by keyboard (possibly no mouse support) to a normal desktop where apps use mouse and GUI and possibly CUA style menus for input to a mobile extreme where there is no keyboard. Supporting all these options and doing each well in the same application can be very difficult. I'd like to see better speech-to-text recognition solutions as that would solve some of the missing keyboard problems with mobile. The technology is there, but not fully in Free Software and not fully in systems that don't make use of the Internet to spread processing to several machines (which could bring up privacy issues). > If the small distros get together I think the collaborative effort would > go leaps and bounds to solve our common issues. A simple GUI toolkit could > be probably written by you and technosaurus over @ puppy, and accept > command line arguments for scripting (he's things like it before with lots > of little examples). Now this is where you run into a problem with collaboration. While everyone may have similar large goals when you get to the design trade-offs, you're going to have trouble getting a group consensus. I believe Technosaurus prefers working with X11 and its libraries. At the moment, I'm concentrating on SDL and OpenGL. We could each write a simple GUI toolkit, but unless we had a similar design philosophy and a similar list of design trade-offs and goals, it would be very hard to collaborate and put together one GUI library that handles everything we'd both want from it. I think you'd have the same issue uniting small distributions. If you find ones with similar goals, you can share with each other. If they're developing things that don't fit your design philosophy or vice versa, it's difficult to reuse work. Israel, you mentioned staying away from BSD components. That makes it hard to share with a project like nenuzhnix because they stay away from GNU components. For instance, I mentioned nano and it will not be a part of nenuzhnix because it's a GNU project. Paul, I like your idea of taking the highlights or the important decisions from the e-mail discussions and putting it all in one place everyone can get to. Would also be nice if we can make some of our goals or decisions accessible via the web so we can refer other distributions to the information and see if they want to collaborate as well. -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~torios Post to : torios@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~torios More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp