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Originally Posted by cRiPpLe_rOoStEr
I've been willing to try Puppy Linux for a while. Maybe next year I'll do it, and if it serves me as well as switching from an old Nokia phone to Android, it won't take long for me to finally switch away from Windows.
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I have a feeling you're probably going to like it. Particularly if you put it on an older computer that you might have given up on. It loves closet computers. For one of those, BionicPup or Fossapup would work great.
The latest and greatest computers are sometimes iffy to get working in all aspects, mainly because of the huge number of proprietary hardware bits stuck into them these days, complicated by programmable firmware, and closed BIOS's.
These sometimes take time to reverse engineer by the main upstream Linux kernel, so with a very new computer you might have to wait a year to find a Puppy linux the works in all aspects (speaker sound, or trackpad, or wifi, or printing are occasional weirdo driver specific. But often not impossible to figure out with help). But the really great thing about it is, there's a super support group willing to help get things going at the Puppy Linux forum.
And as I said, some version of Puppy linux will probably work out of the box for any computer more than say a year old. BTW Older versions of Puppy Linux, like Bionicpup are not "worse" than newer versions. They just relate to different periods and classes of hardware. I think Bionic is probably one of the best OS's ever written. Fossa, is good though, too.
Most recent is F96-CE, based on Fossa, mainly if a computer is very recent and isn't cooperating, it has the best chance of working.
But I'd actually run an earlier version by choice if I could. I like the included applications better.
If you do try Puppy, always just do a "frugal" install, not a "full" install (like Ubuntu, Mint, etc) A frugal install ,means just putting a few files on your computer, coexisting with whatever else is on there. Not rewriting your whole drive with Puppy. Absolutely no need for that, and in fact, it's not nearly as flexible.
The reason a frugal install is actually better than a full one is that Puppy loads the entire operating system into memory when it starts up. This includes its standard applications, too (word processing, spreadsheet, browser, etc, etc). So you really don't need to take over the whole hard drive. It doesn't run from the hard drive anyway. Those few files it does install are big and contain the entire OS. But they can just sit as regular files in your old OS. They can sit as regular files in Windows. Or on a thumbdrive.
Okay, I've said enough. But I've just scratched the surface....