I have an appimage of FF esr on the 2005 machine (64-bit) with just one gig of ram, it will run one tab just fine, even up to 2-3 tabs, but if I open anymore or try to open another app while the browser is open, it bogs down and gets all swappy.

Wondering if the 32 bit version of FF would be any lighter on ram? Most 32 bit apps are.

Yeah the browser is the only fly in the ointment, otherwise i'd just make an updated 32 bit from that repo, with all the apps somebody might could use offline, I mean it all works fine, it's just the browser from that time that's not going to work right and may have bad security issues.

Re: security; I don't know that much about appimages, just the basics, but isn't an appimage already partially sandboxed? Especially if it's in userspace with no root privileges?

I'm aware of tiny-core, have messed with it a lot over the years. I don't want to use it. I want to make this thing using Devuan.

@RRQ- Security is probably not even much of an issue for people who might use this, I started to just update the 32-bit system I already have with a 32-bit appimage of a browser, but then I started wondering about making the whole thing more secure and of course live-CD/DVD/USB popped into my head and that would probably be the simplest and most secure. But many old machines won't boot from USB, and having to rely on an old optical drive to boot and run every day may not pan out well in the end.

I've had multiple people ask me to build a new 32-bit Vuu-do, and I have some 32 bit machines down at the library and a printer-scanner i'd like to resurrect.

I'm not targeting anything below 512 mb of ram, that's for stuff like Tiny-core.

Oh i'm aware, I used to be a user, actually have some isos still around here somewhere. But I think what i'm proposing is different, Puppy is all read-only with the potential for a persistence file, no real difference from a live-usb.

Well i'm not a ninja at this stuff like the devs and many of the members here, i'm just an ol redneck with a keyboard.

But it seems to me, that if all the people who have issues with pipewire and pulse over the years, got together and said to hell with soundservers, let's just improve ALSA itself and give it nice native soundserving functions with a nice GUI to configure it....that might be a better solution?

FYI in excalibur, there are some new lines in the ALSA 90-alsa-restore-rules in /etc/udev/rules.d that I don't quite understand, and are doing nothing that I can see except throwing up error messages in boot. This may be an issue going forward. I can get rid of the errors and get it working normally by replacing or modding that file to use the daedalus version.

Dang Steve, you're a mite hard to understand, you've been arguing vehemently the importance of whatever it is you're arguing about, but then in the above sentence you freely admit it may be important to like 3 people.

C'mon, jump in there and fix some stuff, it will make you feel better, i've been doing it for days now, even fixing tiny things gives me a nice feeling of accomplishment.

Sorry you didn't like my browser experiment, but it IS in fact a browser as you can browse the web with it and 95% of everything works, even video. I'm working on that as a single-purpose frontend to some web-based things like Libera-chat's web interface.

New versions of the Openbox max and mini uploaded, been a crazy weekend of bug-hunting and
tweaking everything to work better, I hate doing band-aids and I had to do one briefly,
but now all that is sorted and everything is working even more smoothly than before.
Lots of tiny fixes that you'd probably never notice, and some that you would.

Now that I have the OB versions in a much better place, it's time to work on the
mate-mini which i've neglected for a couple of weeks while I worked on everything
else. Going to apply all the updates and improvements of this last couple weeks,
but i'm also making some very noticeable changes, mainly re-enabling of desktop
icons and moving conky display to the right side. I myself don't use desktop shortcuts,
but I understand that some folks do, and may choose Mate in the first place for those
kinds of convenience. So i'm going to depart from policy and make the changes.

Did that update yesterday, but I used Synaptic so didn't see all the output. But it worked fine and nothing is broken in /etc/alternatives.

Could it be because you updated the lzma package(s) for two different arches? That might cause some confusion.

I'm with Ralph on this one. Really not Devuan's job as it is meant to be a source for distributions, not one in of itself though it does provide working systems.

IMO it's the derivatives and their devs who should be doing that sort of customization based upon what their vision is for use-case-scenario for their distro.

Like how default Devuan only provides basic free firmware as-shipped, leaving it up to users and devs to decide what they want to add.

Please feel free to roll up your own distro with fixes for the issues you mentioned Steve, i'll be the first one to download, test, and congratulate you (and also steal any tasty bits of code you come up with, lol).

Greenjeans<<using nothing but ALSA and eating popcorn watching people fret over PW and PA while I listen to music.

As much as I hate bloat, and I think everybody understands the lengths I go to to be rid of it, it's actually pretty understandable when you think about it.

Take for instance the kernel itself, it now has to support 20+ years of widely varied and increasingly complex hardware, it's pretty amazing that it can even do so. And so many other programs have to do some of that too.

But yeah, whole lotta superfluous code out there, for myself I keep looking for ways to slim it down, a small script that ties a couple things together instead of installing one or more additional packages to do it, things like that, trying to solve issues using what I already have onboard as opposed to immediately looking to apt to solve it for me.

Glad you like it my friend! But no credit to me on this one, that's all Devuan right there. But yeah, for one thing the mini's are always faster from the get go, and that one is not the whole Mate metapackage, just the core and some extra utilities.

I have noticed in testing, that the Excalibur-based stuff seems very snappy and quick compared to current, really looking forward to seeing how it all performs once declared stable. I think Mate itself has made some improvements too.

One quick tip: The Mate menu is usually the first thing to feel sluggish, Mate does cache icon images, but for some reason still tries to re-size SVG's every time you open the menu, so if you have any large ones being used for menu icons for certain programs, it gets glitchy.

Worst offender is still Handbrake with a 3 mb SVG, really messes up that menu, I make PNG's in proper sizes for it on my own systems and get rid of the SVG.

Most SVG's these days though have gotten a lot better and by that I mean much smaller.

Just uploaded newly updated versions of all the 5.03's.

Lots of updates got pushed the last few days including some security related. I
have now gotten the theme i've been working on all along looking nice enough that
i've named it and pushed out some of the old stuff. Ice-Breaker, for Mate and
Openbox. Added some more mods and tweaked some colors and also did some work with
the icon set so it's looking better too. I also made some small changes in the OB
rotate and re-size scripts and the .desktop files to add support for webp, heic,
and avif image formats. So those will all work with the various right-click options
for images now. Also some more small cosmetic changes in a couple of programs.