torios team mailing list archive

[ml@xxxxxxxxxxxx]

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.