Puppy Linux

Reader supplied reviews for Puppy Linux Average rating 7.6 from 51 review(s) Please selecting a rating in the range of 1-10. Please write at least a few sentences about the distribution while limiting your review to 4080 characters. What are your thoughts on Puppy Linux? Please include a few pros and a few cons, along with your overall impression of the operating system. Our FAQ page has tips on writing a good mini-review. Version: -- 22.129.58.07.56.3.26.05.75.6.15.55.45.2.85.1.15.0.14.34.2.14.1.24.003.012.17.12.021.0.9 Rating:    -- 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 out of 10 Your review (minimum 250 words): Past reviews - sort by: DateVotes Version: 22.12 Rating: 9 Date: 2023-07-08 Votes: 7 I use it on a low-end chromebook, it is amazingly fast. First you need to put your chromebook in developer mode. Then you need to install the proper firmware to boot UEFI (follow instructions from mrchromebox.tech). Etch the ISO on a USB thumb drive and you can boot puppy (when booting, press CTRL-L to enter into the bios, insert the USB thumb drive, select it to boot). You then have a fairly complete OS sitting completely in RAM, no need to install it or to set up dual-boot. The pre-installed utilities are sufficient for most tasks and extremely light. The look-and-feel is a bit old-school, but straightforward. You can install the browser of your choice (there is a menu entry for that), and install a couple of command-line tools you need using the package manager. You can even install LibreOffice if you want to, although the antique Abiword might be sufficient to draft simple memos. The packages are pulled from the Slackware repositories on this version. There also exist Ubuntu-based versions of puppy linux, which are also good. It is just a matter of choice, the latest Ubuntu version containes just a bit more applications (look for the F96 version). Puppy is different from other distributions as it runs in root. This is not an issue since the ISO is not corruptible and you could just reboot if needed. Also, it is a distribution for single users. For safer web browsing, there is a restricted "spot" user you can configure in the startup menu. For chromebook, you may want to delete the file etc\acpi\actions\suspend.sh, which makes the laptop reboot instead of suspend, for example if you close the lid. Since it runs completely in RAM, it is amazingly fast. If you turn off the laptop, it leaves no trace on the laptop. In my case, I can still use the chromebook for family purposes. Also, it is very efficient from the power consumption standpoint, in my case providing 8 hours or more of operation. I have tried several lightweight distributions, this one is the most efficient and complete in my opinion. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 9.5 Rating: 9 Date: 2023-06-24 Votes: 12 Am running debian on 2 laptops, arch for my "gamer rig", and 3 laptops from the 2000s (thinkpads, of course) with puppy. Xenial, Fossa and bionic pups, however I've also tried slackware and tahr pups. Been using linux since 2020. Will admit it took a good while to figure out how to use puppy os. Spent some hours troubleshooting for my unique needs. Ended up using puppy daily for browsing (after figuring out how to update firefox, that's the first thing I suggest you do, don't bother using any other browsers it comes with, as it is quite effort to get them up to date), word processing for school work, pdf reading, video/movie watching, emulating psx games, etc. Due to how puppy is set up, I have both been able to use it on days I did not want to bother tinkering and wanted to use my laptops casually, but I've also been able to troubleshoot and learn a lot about PCs/linux in the process, making it easier for me to understand and use debian when I needed to do more tech savvy things on other PCs. The repos aren't too up to date, so you won't get every niche program you crave, but you still get most of the basics. Don't expect telegram, element, spotify, etc. internet based software to work unless you really want to go through a lot of steps, and have an annoying time keeping them up to date. The effort wasn't worth it for me. They say the installer is hard, but as a noob, I was able to figure it out by following a couple tutorials at the same time. Not that daunting. It is an OS very not likely to ever break, since essencially, it never receives any updates, aside bug fixes. It's made me realize that I really don't need the latest featues, aside keeping my firefox up to date. Which is easy enough to do. It has brought new life into my 2gb to 4gb laptops, making them feel like new. I can have a lot of tabs open at once, or worst case scenario, run 1 video with 5 text based tabs open, on a laptop with just 2gb of RAM. It feels as fast as when I first got these archaic laptops back in the day when I was a kid. I see myself in the future always having a 2nd laptop running puppy os, since the experience is pleasant once you've taken the time to familiarize and learn how to use it correctly. Easy options during install to set everything to run as root, no need for logins at boot, no need to worry about updates, nor anything breaking, etc. If you do anything risky, you can setup so that sessions are not saved before you reboot. I can see myself using this distro for the rest of my life on cheap 2gb RAM travel sized laptops, or second hand ones, when I don't need my debian PCs. Wacom tablets run excellent on puppy, if you don't mind using an ancient version of krita, of course. Was more effort to setup my huion tablet though. Overall, great niche distro for oddball people like myself. I started using puppy to revive a few pre-historic laptops that were gifted to me, thinking it'd be a temporary OS for me until these current laptops pass away, to now seeing myself using puppy for many years to come, assuming this project never gets abandoned. My favorite experience as of writing this has been with fossapup. Was this review helpful? Yes No Version: 22.12 Rating: 9 Date: 2023-06-23 Votes: 5 I trialed both FossaPup and BionicPup. For home users (I am not sure how IBM MQ and IBM ACE would work on a puppy on a Puppy system) Puppy has a lot of merit. It is blazingly fast like SliTaz and Porteus and far easier to configure. Like Porteu,Puppy has its own way of doing things, it is not standard Linux, so a little learning is in order, but damn it is fast and light. I am not sure why there was such a spread between free, top,and htop in terms of memory but with the firewall running it was using 193 MB via free -m and top and around 300 MB via htop. Did I say it is fast? I clicked ongnumeric and the spreadsheet was up as my finger came off the key,Palemoon was up quickly playing a youtube video and total RAM burned was only 512 MB via htop. Fastest opening for images or playing downloaded videos I have yet seen. Lots of apps, very, very fast, an easy to navigate, intuitive desktop (reminds me of Q4OS), great set-up utilities (set up wifi). For homeusers who just want to surf the net, read e-mails, watch youtube, run a spreadsheet and do word processing this is a winner. A great distro. Interestingly, the Puppy forum gives great support, on par with Mint for responsiveness. With some of the distros it may be hard o get assistance but the Puppy community is very friendly and helpful. There is a level of camaraderie n the Puppy community absent in many distro specific forums, If you running older hardware also check out Bodhi, Porteus, WattOS, SliTaz, Q4OS, LXLE, tfb Was this review helpful? Yes No See all 51 reader reviews of Puppy Linux...