Puppy again, but wait... there's more!

[jayseye]

The latest Puppy Linux 5.3 "Slacko" is compatible with Slackware 13.37 packages.

Why even mention this, given the widely-reported issues with their community? Well, for one thing, Slacko is billed as being "built with packages from the Slackware, Salix and Slacky repositories."

Just sayin'...

[GJones]

[rant ahead]

I tried Puppy once. I didn't like it much, as it had some huge and obvious design flaws. Designs flaws like:

- Everything runs as root, and it's very hard to set up a limited user account. This makes Puppy about as secure as Windows XP.

- No binary software updates are provided. Given that the desktop already runs as root, this makes Puppy about as secure as Windows XP SP2 without any updates... Or HIPS, or sandboxing software, or antivirus.

- Package management in general is not sane at all. Current Puppy is based on Ubuntu... But uses its own package manager, and additionally its own special format for some packages. And more obnoxiously, the package management GUI has a "trim the fat" option that removes files from installed packages, as if that is an efficient way to save HDD space.

- The "user friendly" interface... isn't. Now I will give Mr. Kauler that he did a good job making JWM more usable... Grats on that. But while Rox is a nice file manager, it is not friendly to beginners at all. (Especially with all outstanding missing features - no batch overwrites, no batch copy/paste, etc.) The volume management scripts often required reboots to recognize USB drives. And I had serious trouble making the installer work properly. I'm assuming that was due to my inability to figure it out, as opposed to bugs in the program.

- Which brings me to... The installation process. You get two options, "frugal" and "full." Frugal is basically sticking the compressed live image and kernel on a partition, with the bootloader pointing to them. Full is what it sounds like, decompressing the image to the partition. Surprisingly, the frugal install is recommended... Because the full install requires you to immediately reinstall a long list of packages after booting into it. OTOH, you won't gain any benefit from a full install (no binary updates, yay), so if you really wish to give this unfortunate pooch a home on your hard drive, you might as well do it frugally.

- But all that doesn't begin to cover the most obnoxious thing about it... The cutesy. This OS looks like it was designed by kids for kids. Various dog-shaped icons festoon the desktop and the filesystem. It even barks at you the first time it boots to the desktop. The Windows XP Luna (aka "Blue, Green, and Orange Clown Suit") theme? That has nothing on Puppy.

As for the community... Well, I know there are a few fruitcakes in it, but I think most such communities contain at least one fruitcake. Based on what little I know, I'm not placing any blame on them.

The distro itself, though, barely qualifies as Linux.

[/end rant]

[DavidMcCann]

But all that doesn't begin to cover the most obnoxious thing about it... The cutesy. This OS looks like it was designed by kids for kids. Various dog-shaped icons festoon the desktop and the filesystem. It even barks at you the first time it boots to the desktop. The Windows XP Luna (aka "Blue, Green, and Orange Clown Suit") theme? That has nothing on Puppy.

I can't resist pointing you to this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDTLJYDHX3g

I've just been trying Slacko Puppy (more wacko than slacko) and it's even worse than usual. It started by telling me that I might like it to take evasive action to avoid problems with my SiS graphics. It turned out that it had no problem with the graphics chip: it was the "work around" that crashed X. They got a lot of software onto the CD by leaving out all the help files, and I couldn't find how to install them. JWM is as inscrutable as ever: I couldn't find how to set sub-pixel smoothing, or how to use the Super key in shortcuts. The weird thing is that it's not even useful for a small computer: it needed as much memory as standard Salix!

[mimosa]

I've had similar trouble with all versions of Puppy after 4.3.1. The latter, however, will run on a solar-powered calculator. Since I've now recycled all my rustiest hulks, I don't have much more use for it. But it did serve me well as a rescue CD in the past, when I didn't know that being root is a bad alternative to learning how permissions work. In those days, it was more clunky than cute, too; and its hardware recognition was much better than subsequent versions have performed in this house.

[GJones]

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea behind Puppy - i.e. breathing new life into old computers. I just think it's done completely wrong. Idle RAM usage on a Debian Squeeze Xfce desktop is the same as on Puppy (~60 MB), and the system is far more stable, secure, and user friendly.

IMHO the main performance issue for Linux on low-end machines isn't RAM use - even giant programs like OpenOffice can run with a few hundred megs of RAM. The big issue, I think, is slow graphical toolkits. GTK2 redraws for instance are way slow even on fast machines, probably because of all the double buffering and stuff GTK2 does (which you can't turn off LOLOLOL!). And Qt4 is supposed to be much faster, but in my experience it often isn't... Though that may have more to do with hardware acceleration bugginess with some graphics chipsets.

Needless to say Puppy doesn't solve this issue, and neither does any other distro. Which is a shame, because your average Pentium II box is perfectly good for casual web browsing with Win2k and Opera, and shouldn't be any worse with Linux. There are lots and lots of computers that should be okay for browsing and office work, and should be reused; but they are instead thrown out and turned into an environmental hazard, or recycled by underpayed workers under bad conditions, thanks in part to software feature creep.

[jayseye]

Thanks, GJones -

Appreciate the well-thought-out reply. I respect and use Things That Just Work, rather than being a fan-boy or a hater. Started this thread simply to pass on the news that Slacko uses Salix packages. Have yet to try it.

Lots of old hardware here, and older versions of Puppy have proven useful in some cases. For instance, and old Dell laptop with a beautiful, large LCD needed a Live CD distro which could play DVDs out of the box, after loading itself into RAM to free up the drive. Puppy 2.14 (?) filled the bill, and we still use the Dell when Internet goes down.

Tried another LiveCD called SliTaz, as it claimed to run on very low RAM PCs. Got derailed from that project when I found Salix, though I still plan to revisit SliTaz when I get a "round tuit."

Aside from low RAM issues, I suspect that recent versions of the Linux kernel are the limiting factor in getting decent performance on old CPUs. Would like to find the time to experiment with custom-compiled kernels to see if there's any work-around.

[gnomic]

Perhaps Puppy is only for the hobbyist, but imho it has to be classed as Linux. It gets a listing on Distrowatch and is currently in the top 10.

Personally I find it handy for burning CDs and DVDs while running live even in limited RAM, and watching DVDs, and occasional web browsing.

[T_Hobbit]

Puppy is wonderful to carry on an USB stick... To be the main OS? It's Linux, the free land, your mind, your choice!

[GJones]

One thing I will say in Puppy's favor, despite all of the above, is that toy distro or no, it works very well on hardware that has other distros wallowing like overfed hippos.

(Remember my Thinkpad 600E? Puppy works fine on that, while even Slitaz is prohibitively slow.)

Beats me why this should be the case though. Puppy binaries are usually repackaged from other distros (except for the T2 based versions) and the kernels don't seem to have any especially unusual patches, so the enormous performance difference on old hardware kind of stumps me. I'd be grateful BTW if anyone could shed some light on that, because I'd like to be able to put something multi-user on the Thinkpad...

[Shador]

Application selection? Different/more minimal system service setup?