Begrudging admission: Puppy Linux rocks

I never tried it because I couldn’t get past the chihuahua mascot, but I spun it up this afternoon, and Puppy Linux gets a huge gold star from me.

I feel a little foolish really, since this is far more amiable and far more interesting than Damn Small Linux. Forgive me if I’m harsh, but DSL is very … efficient, almost to a fault. It’s great if you’re a tech fan (I’m not afraid to count myself in that bunch), but it can be a bit sparse. I kept to DSL for a long time simply because it seemed to do the best job with hardware testing.

But Puppy, on the other hand, seems much more friendly — much more usable. It does most of the same things, but in a nicer, calmer fashion. Almost everything is a point-and-click affair. Setting up, configuring and testing are all handled with a few keystrokes. The entire business is running on less than 256Mb of memory. It found all my hardware and walked me through configuring my network. And probably best of all, package installation is a breeze. It’s even simpler than Synaptic.

One of the nicest things about it is that (I think most, if not all) the default software is GTK-based. In a lot of ways, this shows how good a lean, fast, efficient and attractive distribution can be. And since I’m a spectator to the slow and painful transmogrification of my old favorite distro, Xubuntu, I feel somewhat vindicated to see someone putting together what in my mind Xubuntu should be: a clean, lean, lightweight distro.

No matter. It’s an excellent distribution and I can see now why it has such a strong following. I probably won’t ever really get over the chihuahua, but that’s for me to solve.

And now my admission in full: CoachDANNY, you were right. It’s great.

Now I need to find out if Slax 6 is all it’s chalked up to be, and maybe take a turn past Wolvix again. And then I think, finally, my distro-hopping will be over for the weekend. 😉