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I'm really happy with this forking adventure, this project is really fun to work on because it gives me many opportunities to learn new things and understand how things work.
Among other things, I:
Size is close to Puppy but it feels so much faster, it feels more responsive, it actually reduces writing to disk, and it consumes less CPU and RAM while also adopting new technologies to improve areas like multi-monitor and Bluetooth support. Ancient GPUs won't work due to the switch to Wayland and the mandatory GL ES 2.0, but at least one early adopter said it works with a pre-2009 computer, so this distro can still be considered suitable for "old computers". Those who use ancient Puppy releases on early 2000s computers won't replace their OS because nothing else works on it, so there's nothing I can do for them.
I think this project is going in a really good direction and I hope to attract more users. It's time for unbased claims like the relationship between Puppy's small size and efficiency or "speed" and flash memory lifespan to go away, because they're clearly wrong. This project has real potential to save many old computers that don't work well with Puppy, and extend the lifespan of computers with old and unreliable drives.
tootik is doing great. It works well, it's stable, test coverage is good and it's faster than ever. I still haven't investigated why GoToSocial doesn't like tootik (at least some instances), but interoperability with Mastodon and Lemmy is in very good shape.
The relatively new "communities" feature works well and I still hope to find a topic that's popular in geminispace, one with enough interested users to start a thriving community. I think it would be nice to have something like a Lemmy community in geminispace for Gemini fans, but open to the fediverse.
To improve performance when users follow communities (either local or Lemmy communities) with many posts, now there's a "feed" table that contains all activities that appear in users' feeds, with a periodic job that appends new activities. Each user's feed is super fast to fetch now and it remains fast when navigating to the next pages.
In addition to the actual speedup, tootik *feels* faster because all pages are streamed now. Page contents are sent in 16 line chunks and tootik continues to query the database and build the rest of the page while sending the previous 16 lines. Therefore, the Gemini-based UI is less sensitive to a server CPU spike or a server<>client latency spike: the user gets more text to read as soon as possible, and clients that render page contents gradually append more posts to the feed while the user is busy reading the first ones.
The newly released Lagrange 1.18.0 features Guppy support. This is huge news, and I didn't expect this!
tootik's recent optimizations make Guppy faster than any other protocol supported by it: the first packet received from the server contains the first 16 lines of the page and tootik allows up to 8 unacknowledged chunks. In some big pages, tootik sends 8 response chunks immediately after the request, then the client acknowledges all packets while the user is already seeing the entire page. Compare that to TCP-based protocols, where at least 3 packets are "wasted" on the handshake, and sometimes the server waits for acks. In tiny pages, the Guppy client receives the entire page in packet #2 of the transaction!
I can't wait for my next desert trip, that's where the inspiration for Guppy came from: mobile signal was so bad I could only do DNS lookups but all TCP handshakes timed out. I don't think I'll have a good opportunity to test Guppy from the desert any time soon, with all the war situation going on.
gplaces is doing fine. It received two bug fixes and has a new logo that looks less flat. I'm still daily driving it on my personal laptop and the work laptop, without any complaints. Boring is good.