A critic/idea/suggestion/complaint (whining?)

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A critic/idea/suggestion/complaint (whining?)

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Started 12 years ago by sidartha_k
Latest reply from gdesilva
This topic is not a support question

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sidartha_k

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Hello. I have a question:
Why Slitaz MUST been under 30mb? Id´been reading a lot of problems related to drivers, configuration, and plugins for audio and video. Personally y experienced several difficulties to configure my system, especially whit Java, Flash, GRUB and the monitor resolution. I´m not an advanced Linux user so i don´t know how to fix those kind of problems.
My suggestion is this: you could increase significantly the regular people (like me!) interest/use of this distribution by make it more "user friendly" (is that the word?).
I know and share the GNU philosophy and i like this distribution very much, but sometimes linux developers must understand that WE DON´T CARE if one plugin it´s not completely free, we just want to watch videos/hear music/etc, etc.

Maybe you could do a Slitaz a little more like Linux Mint, who came whit all what you need to browse the web, already installed.

That´s my only critic. And I still can´t believe how much you can do whit such a tiny distribution like Slitaz. It´s a great job, and thank you very much for do it.

Goodbye.

PS: My native language is spanish, not english. Don´t be a nazi grammar please!

Posted 12 years ago #
Trixar_za

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Key Master

It's not because of GNU that we exclude certain parts. It's mostly to save space.

What you see is the compressed 30MB iso. Uncompressed SliTaz 3 takes up about 160MB of space - all of which gets loaded into RAM so you can remove the LiveCD after you boot it. As you know, one of SliTaz's goals is to run on older machines with atleast 256MB of RAM to use the LiveCD like I mention above. The downside of this? The max we can use for SliTaz to keep this goal is around 190MB. That's not a lot of space for everything. So the best way to use the space effectively is that we need to use generic drivers and those built into the the kernel. This means that to use something fully you may have to install the driver yourself using utilities like tazx and tazhw.

Other distros work around this LiveCD issue by taking about 200MB of the RAM and leaving the rest on the CD. The downside of this? Well, it locks your CD/DVD ROM so you can't use it and if you only have one, your pretty much stuck without it. SliTaz does have flavours that does this itself, but that is aimed at systems with very little resources, meaning SliTaz's LiveCD can run on a system with atleast 32MB of RAM.

Here's the thing: SliTaz isn't meant to be another Linux Mint and it will never be. Even with Windows or Ubuntu you need to install the codecs to be able to listen or watch certain formats and don't forget with both you also need to install flash to use Youtube. The point is SliTaz was designed to breath new life to old machines and be super fast. It had to sacrifice some ease of use for this.

This doesn't mean you can't go out and make a fully featured SliTaz yourself. Sites like http://pizza.slitaz.org give you this ability to mould SliTaz with most of the features you may want. And if you want a SliTaz that works like Mint, then go at it. You'd probably find a lot of people that would agree with and help you along the way.

Posted 12 years ago #
gdesilva

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Member

Slitaz has a niche 'market' or a user-base. As Trixar_za points out "SliTaz was designed to breath new life to old machines and be super fast". Hence I agree that it should be kept as small as possible.

However, if one wants a more 'user friendly' or 'out of the box' solution then there are plenty of other linux variants to choose from or build one's own version of Slitaz.

I think if we try to make Slitaz something for everyone then chances are that it will very soon move away from the original goal mentioned by Trixar_za

Posted 12 years ago #

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