What's Your Non-Puppy Puppy?

[johnywhy]

I used puppy cuz i wanted an ultra tiny OS with GUI and ease of use. Especially for older machines. My faves were the Lina's, NOP, x-tahr, saluki, and anything else with xfce. Gotta be xfce. Was never into the fatter puppies.

However, i grew to find that puppy wasn't quite sufficient: i wanted something compatible with the outside universe linux ecosystem/repos, non-root security layer. and harder to "break" (as my puppies seemed a bit too easy to mess up).

For a time, i toyed with StretchDog and DevuanDog. I like the idea, of those, but eventually too experimental. I needed an OS for doing work, not just for playing with the OS (not that there's anything wrong with that

X-Tahr 2.0 remains my favorite puppy, and the one i still use in emergencies. Seems most stable of the xfce puppies. I always have an x-tahr SD card laying around (if you haven't tried booting from an SD, it's much faster than USB).

http://www.murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=99849

But for real work, i've graduated to arch linux and archlabs linux. Seems to be the slimmest, most lightweight of all the "real" linuxes. ISO Size: 652.0 MB. Generally stable rolling release, strong community support. Comprehensive 'official' repo, plus a huge community repo. Works great on older machines, and with xfce a very nice environment. Gotta be xfce, the only linux desktop i will use.

https://www.archlinux.org/

Many of you hackers don't care about "easy", but i want to get work done, not spent hours and days trying to get my OS to work. The pure arch install is quite easy, but the Archlabs spin is even easier -- the easiest linux install i've ever done. Beware, if you go to arch forum for help, don't tell them you're using labs. They will quickly ban you if you ask for support for anything but pure arch.

https://archlabslinux.com/

i'm still a puppy at heart, so i try to slim down arch as much as i can. I remove things which eat up RAM, or who's functionality are adequately handled by the base utilities. For example, i remove sudo (i consider it a security hole) and pulse (alsa works fine), use a command-line package manager. I remove the DM, just command-line auto-login. No wallpaper, etc. If you're going for leanest base install, stick with pure arch instead of labs.

Atm, running geary with four email accounts and Opera with 30 tabs open (with a hibernator). Using 1GB RAM.

i've made a few attempts to build arch without systemd, but no success yet. On the back burner for the moment. Why knows, maybe someone out there will make an arch puppy Tho' i'd personally be more interested in an ultra-slimmed down arch, than an arch-puppy.

What's your non-puppy puppy?

[bullpup]

None at the moment. I use Puppy 99,99999% of the time.

Sometimes i do some file analysis or check a network for someone I'd use Parrot Security OS (A formula one car without brakes basically, it's not that good at all). But only once in a blue moon.

Sometimes I forget to plug in the Pup USB and I'd end up with the distro on the host. That would be Peppermint OS which I adore!

But yeah, mainly puppies for Puppy reasons

[johnywhy]

bullpup wrote:

Peppermint OS which I adore

Mint is sortof in the same family, right? i used to be a fan of Mint, until i discovered arch. Much leaner and faster than Mint. The arch community seems more serious and knowledgeable than Mint community.

[bullpup]

bullpup wrote:

Peppermint OS which I adore

Mint is sortof in the same family, right? i used to be a fan of Mint, until i discovered arch. Much leaner and faster than Mint. The arch community seems more serious and knowledgeable than Mint community.

Yes, sort of indeed. Based on Ubuntu (as Mint is): https://peppermintos.com/ <=== (for your reading pleasure).

I like the dark theme it's easy on the eyes and of course the ICE implementation. What does it for me is the stability and (relative) fast boot time. And it's one of the most stable distro's I've ever used. I still have an old IBM thinkpad running Peppermint 24/7 as a file sharing machine. It never fails me and is quite fast, low on resources too.