Tonghts talk was another hybrid online /offline event with most people attending via Zoom.
Bernard's talk grew out of his Archive article comparing several RISC OS distros.

The idea of a distro is to be useful and may be targeted at different users (newcomers, retro gamers, returnees, etc). There is hardware available with various apps bundles (ie come with your new 4te) and also Software only distros.
 
Bernard covered Distros from several criteria such as range, ease of use, documentation, etc. A distro needs to have some thinking behind it and be clear what its audience is (not the world).
 
There was an interesting table showing how the distros are presented with all the different directories round in the ROOL, ePic, RPCEmi and Cloverleaf distros which contain applications. ROOL has most of the extra software in a single NutPi Directory. Not all the directories are logical.
 
Next he looked at a list of actual applications (and version numbers) included in the distros.
 
One big update on the article is the inclusion of the Cloverleaf distro which aims to have a lot more software (including games).
 
After the overview, the rest of the meeting was about the topic.
 
Packman was mentioned as the apps do not necessarily live in the same locations as in Packman so updates are not necessarily automatic. RISC OS users like the flexibility to put their apps where they want. Several attendees showed how they organised their desktops.
 
It would be nice to be able to search for Apps in the desktop for new users. This would make it more friendly for newbies.
 
It was a really good discussion and lots of interesting suggestions were raised.
 
Rougol website