Hello everysheep,

I want to preface this by apologizing if I am asking a stupid question, but here I go.

What actually is the difference between PureData, PurrData, PlugData, all that. Is it just UI and libs? I see a lot more people using these 3 versions for different things, so it might be... Idk, feel free to yell at me.

@polyplexmescalia Have you seen this explanation? https://puredata.info/
Scroll down to the section entitled "Main Pd Flavours"

@jameslo No, I actually haven't, but thank you for sharing.

Some basic info, with some details that are not on that puredata.info page

Pure Data (aka Vanilla):

• Official and main distribution by Miller;
• no pre bundled externals but you can install them via an internal package manager (deken);
• sheer simple UI interface coded in tcl/tk
• Can run as a VST with Miller's PureVST

Pd-Ceammc;

• Fully compatible to Vanilla, but currently a few versions behind (0.53, while Vanilla is releasing 0.56 in a couple of weeks)
• Same deal, also coded in tcl/tk, has deken, etc, but a revamped/tweaked UI. You can install externals and whatever but since it's behind you can't run the latest ELSE, for instance (which uses Multichannel stuff from 0.54).
• Comes with the humongous ceamm library, which can also be installed in Vanilla, but I don't see the last version there.

PlugData;

• Fully compatible to Vanilla and is the only fork that excels at staying immediately up to date with Vanilla.
• It comes with Cyclone/ELSE/pd-lua/Gem.
• It works as a plugin, with the included libraries. The standalone version can run externals.
• It has a different UI front end based on JUCE so GUI objects need to be ported. Vanilla's internals and ELSE's GUI objects were ported.

Purr Data/Pd-L2ork

• These two are independent and not fully compatible to each other. Pd-L2ork started as a fork of Pd-Extended using tkpath (which only ran on Linux). Purr Data started as Pd-L2ork 2.0, based on an HTML5 front GUI. They're now split but Pd-L2ork now incorporates the HTML5 GUI rewrite.
• Historically they were way behind in keeping up with Vanilla's development. Now they caught up and are based on Vanilla 0.55.
• There are some incompatibilities with Vanilla, some objects with different behaviour. There are some objects only for them that you can't install in Vanilla.
• Externals compiled for Vanilla don't run in Pd-L2ork, so they have to be specially compiled for them.
• Like PlugData, GUI externals need to be ported. Being based on extended, most of the GUI externals from Extended were ported.
• Some of the extended libraries were not updated yet to the current version, most notably Cyclone.

There is also pd-next which is mostly vanilla pd but with color themes and [closebang]/[initbang]. Nice for those that prefer vanilla but don't want to stare at a white screen.
https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/10943/a-little-pd-mod