[Techtalk] recommendations for distros wanted

[Miriam English]

Hi folks,

I have used Puppy Linux for about a decade and a half and have been 
mostly happy with it, however Rox, its preferred file manager, has not 
been updated for several years and the most recent version has a very 
inconvenient bug, so I've been looking at perhaps moving to another 
distro. (I doubt my programming abilities are sufficient to fix it.)

In using Puppy I've customised it to be even more easy to use than the 
standard version is. I've relied heavily upon two very useful features 
of Rox: DirIcons and AppDirs.

A DirIcon consists of an ordinary image file inside a directory with the 
special name ".DirIcon". The leading dot makes it hidden when viewing 
the directory contents, but when the folder is viewed from outside, then 
the default folder icon is replaced by whatever image the .DirIcon is. 
This makes it very easy to set up many different directories in complex 
hierarchies, yet let my eye jump quickly to the most commonly used ones. 
Also, the .DirIcon can be a link, so I can set up my folders so that I 
can have what are in effect several "default" folder icons by making 
.DirIcons for those folders as absolute links to various folder icons.

AppDirs are even more useful. They let a folder act like an executable, 
so it can be clicked to run a program or a file can be dropped on the 
AppDir to run the program with the dropped file as a parameter. The 
AppDir contains a few special files:

- AppRun - an executable (usually a bash script) that gets executed when 
the folder is clicked.

- AppInfo.xml - a simple xml file that gives popup information when the 
mouse hovers over the AppDir and also lets the creator make a popup menu 
for when the AppDir is right-clicked, letting any one of various 
programs in the AppDir be selected, or any of various parameters be 
selected for the program.

- .DirIcon - as mentioned earlier an image that depicts the program that 
the AppDir executes.

The AppDir can contain an executable and all necessary dependencies so 
that it can run in a nearly system-independent way. It also lets me run 
scripts from icons on the desktop. I've created a series of such icons 
that act like an editor, letting me do cool things anywhere text entry 
happens -- in the terminal,  in a web browser's forum text entry, a file 
renaming dialogue box, any ordinary text editor, and so on. This enables 
easy checking of word-count, putting HTML tags around selected text, 
inserting the current date and time in any of several formats, running 
sed on text in a window to search/replace text using regex, wrap text by 
getting rid of carriage returns inside paragraphs, and much, much more.

So you can see why I want a distro and/or window manager or file manager 
that can use DirIcons and AppDirs. Does anybody know of any?

Cheers,

     - Miriam

-- 
The only person that you should try to be better than is the person you were yesterday.
  -- Ain Eineziz