I’ve been semi-active on the DSL forums for a while and some of these people just don’t seem to get the point. The purpose of DSL is to fit as much Linux as possible onto a 50MB Business Card CD and have a functional, relatively easy to use GUI dekstop. That’s it, that’s the purpose. Anything that does not fit within these constraints is extraneous and will be cut away. John, the project founder/maintainer, has done an excellent job, in my humble opinion, of doing just that.
There is a concerted effort by a few members of the forum to convince John to make DSL just a little bit bigger, maybe twice it’s size.
Why not then ad[d] one additional DSL wellpacked business-cd with lots of [e]xtra candy installscripts and/or run-from-cd-apps, for toram-users? Ok, it would be one more business-cd, but how much more physical space would it steal if i for example put the t[w]o of them in my wallet on the top of each other? Would it fill up more space in the wallet than 3 millimeter in thickness and close to 0 mm in width/length? Of course only people who like the idea of an extra cd would use it, and therfore everyone would be glad and happy.Well, these are some seemingly innocuous questions, why shouldn’t you add another CD to the mix?
Well, for one, it goes against the entire point of the mission statement. The point of the exercise is to put as much Linux on a 50MB CD yet have a functional desktop. The simple act of going over 50MB causes the project to fail it’s primary purpose.
Secondly, there are already other distributions doing this. If DSL isn’t enough for you, then maybe this isn’t the distribution for you. There are other projects that are probably doing all the things that you wish John would just be “open-minded” enough to put into DSL. Prime example–Luit (which seems to have a few followers on the DSL forums, and there are others.
Thirdly, it’s more fun to play by the rules. How much fun would it be if you started out Monopoly owning Boardwalk and Parkplace, or played chess and could move the pieces any way you wanted. Nobody likes to play games when the rules are constantly changed. John’s delineated the rules to DSL, let’s see if we can stick to ‘em.
Yet, there are alternatives to those that are dissatisfied with DSL. You could remaster DSL and start your own distribution, or you could write your own userspace programs if they’re small enough and good enough and they fulfill some function that hasn’t already been addressed by existing applications, or they do a better job, John might even add them to the distro’. Finally, you could just stop crying and move on DSL is obviously not the distro for you. Most of us who use it like it just fine, however, and we want it to stay the way it is–fast, useful and small.
Posted by Philip McClure in Linux Rants on March 18, 2004