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I run Easy as a second portable OS. One of the reasons I just joined here is because of the mention of Easy. I'm not sure folks understand what Barry has actually created there with Easy. The default concept is absolutely fantastic and I have been playing with it a lot lately as a dedicated project. It is one of the most secure Operating Systems available out of the box. Others like Tails can't hold a candle to this Distro, just the speed alone blows Tails out of the water let alone the default containerization. And Barry is absolutely right, time to ditch the .iso protocol and move to Images... .iso needs to become obsolete...

Welcome to the site. :)
 


This is the best feature of Easy OS imo.
Totally isolated from drives
The boot menu has an option "Copy session to RAM & disable drives", which boots to a desktop with power of administrator (root) in all respects except totally isolated from the drives of the PC. This is an alternative to using containers, and is intended to be even more secure than containers. An introduction is here.
 
This is the best feature of Easy OS imo.
Totally isolated from drives
The boot menu has an option "Copy session to RAM & disable drives", which boots to a desktop with power of administrator (root) in all respects except totally isolated from the drives of the PC. This is an alternative to using containers, and is intended to be even more secure than containers. An introduction is here.
Oh yes... Absolutely! And no systemd. Is there another thread on here dedicated to Easy?
 
This is the best feature of Easy OS imo.
Totally isolated from drives
The boot menu has an option "Copy session to RAM & disable drives", which boots to a desktop with power of administrator (root) in all respects except totally isolated from the drives of the PC. This is an alternative to using containers, and is intended to be even more secure than containers. An introduction is here.
Well this certainly looks worth a looksie. TBH, I assumed, based on the name, it was going to be a more user-centric lightweight OS (Puppy MK III, lol). But I'm glad I clicked that link. Definitely gonna fire up a VM on this one at some point.
 
I don't know if it will work on a VM.

It should work okay in a VM.

should

I'd be interested in poking at it if it doesn't work. I like poking at that sort of thing.
 
It should work okay in a VM.

I don't know about EasyOS, I haven't tried it. But I will say this PuppyLinux may be the easiest to use.....
IF...IF... IF... you run it from a USB drive. If you try installing it to a VM drive or a physical hard drive it gets
a little harder. I've gotten it to work, but it wasn't nearly as easy as installing, say... Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, Debian,
Kali, SuSE, Rocky, or several others. There is an installer, but it's not nearly as straight forward as you think.
The drive had to be pre-formatted. It only wanted ext4, EFI doesn't work. The copy from source was confusing,
and dd'ing from the iso doesn't work. I would say Puppy is a pretty good "Live" distro. But not so good at running
on a VM.

Once you finally get it installed, it isn't very configurable. You can't run another desktop other than the one you installed.
You can mount external drives to the OS boot drive, you can save your "settings" to persistent storage this way, but
the OS itself... it's a pain to install local. To it's credit, it comes with a lot pre-installed, but it's not a distro I would
run VirtualBox or even docker on.
 
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But I will say this PuppyLinux may be the easiest to use.....
IF...IF... IF... you run it from a USB drive.

That worked the last time I tried it. You just boot to the .iso file.

I have never "installed" a Puppy varient on a disk. So, I have no experience there. I've always just used it in the live version. I think I did once play with it long enough to set it up so that it had persistent memory, meaning settings and downloads were retained on the USB thumbdrive.

So, I can't speak to installing it. That's just something I've never taken the time to do, probably because I have never intended to use Puppy for anything other than gaining some basic familiarity. That was some years ago, as well.
 
I don't know about EasyOS, I haven't tried it. But I will say this PuppyLinux may be the easiest to use.....
IF...IF... IF... you run it from a USB drive. If you try installing it to a VM drive or a physical hard drive it gets
a little harder. I've gotten it to work, but it wasn't nearly as easy as installing, say... Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, Debian,
Kali, SuSE, Rocky, or several others. There is an installer, but it's not nearly as straight forward as you think.
The drive had to be pre-formatted. It only wanted ext4, EFI doesn't work. The copy from source was confusing,
and dd'ing from the iso doesn't work. I would say Puppy is a pretty good "Live" distro. But not so good at running
on a VM.
I think I had problems too if I remember right. Easy is based off Puppy. Same creator. ButI think I had problems with VM being a Container and the OS designed to make containers.
I don't know about EasyOS, I haven't tried it. But I will say this PuppyLinux may be the easiest to use.....
IF...IF... IF... you run it from a USB drive. If you try installing it to a VM drive or a physical hard drive it gets
a little harder. I've gotten it to work, but it wasn't nearly as easy as installing, say... Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu, Debian,
Kali, SuSE, Rocky, or several others. There is an installer, but it's not nearly as straight forward as you think.
The drive had to be pre-formatted. It only wanted ext4, EFI doesn't work. The copy from source was confusing,
and dd'ing from the iso doesn't work. I would say Puppy is a pretty good "Live" distro. But not so good at running
on a VM.

Once you finally get it installed, it isn't very configurable. You can't run another desktop other than the one you installed.
You can mount external drives to the OS boot drive, you can save your "settings" to persistent storage this way, but
the OS itself... it's a pain to install local. To it's credit, it comes with a lot pre-installed, but it's not a distro I would
run VirtualBox or even docker on.
The same Developer for Puppy made Easy OS. While it is based on Puppy it is completely different in construction. By default Barry designed it to clone or create containers of it's self. So a VM is not needed. With just a click it creates additional containers and you can switch back and forth between them but they stay isolated from each other like using a Virtual Box.

That is the Genius in how it is designed. At boot it borrows a clone image of what is on the stick and loads it in RAM. Then you use the "Working Container" running in RAM which remains completely isolated from the stick and all other drives. And then with a click it creates additional cloned isolated containers if you like. Cool thing is you can customize containers and save them to be used from a list of your optional custom containers.

Cool thing is there is no install .iso file process. If you want to install it to a hard disk or another USB drive all you have to do is create a bootable partition and copy three folders over into it, good to go. The system really works well. :)
 
Cool thing is there is no install .iso file process. If you want to install it to a hard disk or another USB drive all you have to do is create a bootable partition and copy three folders over into it, good to go. The system really works well.

It's been my experience, there is really no such thing as a bootable partition, only boot flags on a partition table.
No problem, I dedicated the whole disk to the VM.

Copy three folders? Which folders? From where? Maybe if I booted from the Live USB it would have been easier,
but instead I booted from the iso into (VirtualBox/Qemu-KVM). Typically VirtualBox and Qemu delete the DVD/iso
after you've booted into them once. I suppose they think you installed to the hard drive and you no longer need the
iso image.

Don't worry, I figured it out. But the instructions were somewhat lacking, it wasn't nearly as intuative as I have
come to expect. Don't get me wrong, I like Puppy.... as long as I run it from a USB drive.
 
Expect Mike to come flying in here any tick of the clock !!....puppy was mentioned !!!!
 
It's been my experience, there is really no such thing as a bootable partition, only boot flags on a partition table.
No problem, I dedicated the whole disk to the VM.

Copy three folders? Which folders? From where? Maybe if I booted from the Live USB it would have been easier,
but instead I booted from the iso into (VirtualBox/Qemu-KVM). Typically VirtualBox and Qemu delete the DVD/iso
after you've booted into them once. I suppose they think you installed to the hard drive and you no longer need the
iso image.

Don't worry, I figured it out. But the instructions were somewhat lacking, it wasn't nearly as intuative as I have
come to expect. Don't get me wrong, I like Puppy.... as long as I run it from a USB drive.
He makes quite a deal out of hating .iso files and formal installs. So what he did was jus
It's been my experience, there is really no such thing as a bootable partition, only boot flags on a partition table.
No problem, I dedicated the whole disk to the VM.

Copy three folders? Which folders? From where? Maybe if I booted from the Live USB it would have been easier,
but instead I booted from the iso into (VirtualBox/Qemu-KVM). Typically VirtualBox and Qemu delete the DVD/iso
after you've booted into them once. I suppose they think you installed to the hard drive and you no longer need the
iso image.

Don't worry, I figured it out. But the instructions were somewhat lacking, it wasn't nearly as intuative as I have
come to expect. Don't get me wrong, I like Puppy.... as long as I run it from a USB drive.
I apologize, I didn't mean to mislead you, I was talking about three folders in Easy OS not Puppy. He makes quite a deal out of hating .iso files and formal installs. So with Easy OS he just made an image. And the image is just three folders that you can copy over to any bootable drive. But yes, I think you are right and Puppy does use an .iso file.

I found that Easy OS is a whole different critter from Puppy. You would have to go dig around on his site to really get a feel for what he put together with it. It really is worth a test run. His goal was to make something portable and super secure similar to "Tails" and leaves no footprints. But man is it fast compared to tails, fast compared to most distros because everything is already loaded and running in RAM.

It is small, only around half a Gb. It is purposely built to be run from a stick. But the selling point for me was the container system. It is slicker than snot... :)

 
Easy OS and Puppy Linux are both created by Barry Kauler.

Easy OS and Puppy Linux both will install and run installed as a frugal on to a USB flash drive.

Easy OS can be installed as a frugal on to a HDD or SSD and run from ram.

Easy OS cannot be run as a Live version it has to be installed to work.

Easy OS has a feature that it can boot into RAM only mode.

In RAM only mode HDDs / SSDs are totally isolated from the OS as if they don't or never existed.

All work from any session can be saved by the user if the user chooses to do so.

I suggest installing Easy OS on to a USB flash drive as a frugal install the way it's meant to be.

Create a bootable USB flash drive and give it a try.


Easy OS and Puppy Linux are unique Linux distros and unlike any of the mainstream Linux distros.

Either of them install and run OOTB without problems or they have always for me.
 
Expect Mike to come flying in here any tick of the clock !!....puppy was mentioned !!!!
^^ Lol!!

I've tried EasyOS, but it's not really my "thang". Y'all know by now that I must be the least security/privacy-obsessed Linux user most people will ever find anywhere.

I'm perfectly content running our Pup as root. The way I have things set-up, she's darned near "iron-clad" indestructible AND impossible to corrupt. Even on the odd occasions when I DO "cock-up", it's a simple matter to restore from backup. From deleting the old install to booting up a restored recent backup takes less than 5 minutes.

Despite that the community has been developing all sorts of new ways of doing stuff in recent years, I've invested an arm & a leg into "traditional" Puppy over the years. Given that my distro-hopping days are all but over now, I'd rather spend my time refining the installs I DO have, in order to make switching between them as simple & painless as possible.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~​

Never think this means I'm "dissing" the efforts of other Puppians. Far from it. We have some unbelievably talented individuals within our wee community, and Puppy is very far from the "toy" distro many others mistakenly label her as. I always have a copy of whatever the latest Puppy happens to be, knocking around the system somewhere, which I'll tinker about with from time to time. Granted, it won't become a fully-fledged member of the kennels for at least 2-3 years yet, but.....that's just me.

If it weren't for Barry's genius in the first place, my computing experience wouldn't be what it is now. I owe that man so much, in so many ways.....not only for creating one of the most unique distros ever, but also for rejuvenating my interest in computing & reminding me it CAN be fun, indirectly "kick-starting" my interest in scripting & automation, and allowing me to create my very own personalized computing eco-system that does whatever I want, in any way that I want it to.

I'm a happy bunny. Have been for more than a decade now.....and every day I genuinely look forward to firing up "our Pup".

It's very true to say I'm content. In this respect, at least, "Life is good".

Mike. ;)
 
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I'm already set in my ways with KDE on Manjaro and Debian, but Puppy sounds interesting. I guess I ought to look into Puppy Linux sometime.

Compared to LM, would it also be a good distro for a Linux newbie?
 
@Mike-W0BTU :-

I'm already set in my ways with KDE on Manjaro and Debian, but Puppy sounds interesting. I guess I ought to look into Puppy Linux sometime.

Compared to LM, would it also be a good distro for a Linux newbie?
Umm.....to be honest, no. Not really. To quote from an earlier post of mine:-

Since Puppy does so many things differently to the mainstream distros, I don't think it's really fair for noobs to 'learn' with Puppy.....because when they invariably want to try out other distros, they then have to learn the nuts'n'bolts all over again. And that never made much sense to me.

I'll help anyone with Puppy if they're genuinely interested. But to MY way of thinking, it's far better for them to get a handle on how the mainstream does things first.....because if they then don't like the way Puppy does things, or can't get their heads around it, they can simply return to the mainstream. And they should still know what they're doing.

No harm, no foul. I know it seems like I'm being a traitor to the cause, or even "elitist".....but that's not the case. At the end of the day, I'm thinking about the users, because when it boils down to it, without a user-base no distro would have much point in existing at all. Puppy really IS "different".

I think that explains why I don't often recommend "our Pup" (my apologies, that's the Yorkshireman in me coming out!).....and when I do, it's usually to folks with an existing Linux background. I know this much; if I hadn't spent at least a few months with Ubuntu - and various others during my 'distro-hopping' phase - I would have been totally lost with Puppy.

Bear in mind that, although she CAN be used solely as a "daily driver", to get the best out of her you DO need to be prepared to spend some time on the Puppy forums.....and to not mind asking plenty of questions. For those of a 'tinkering' disposition, she can't be beat.....especially if you're the type who loves pulling things to bits and then re-building 'em again.

(You'll have to forgive me. I've always thought of Puppy in terms of a cute little female dog. Rather like how sailors always refer to boats/ships as 'she/her'..!)

Every Puppy includes the tools, OOTB, for re-mastering a Puppy to your own liking. This is why there are thousands of extant 'Puplets'.....because so many members, over the years, have done exactly that.

Me, I'm into packaging more than anything, because I'm interested in what you can run on TOP of the OS...and in recent years, I've been scripting/building some of my own utilities, along with developing an entire range of 'portable' applications. Any OS, regardless of class, architecture OR philosophical viewpoint, is about as much use as a chocolate teapot IF there's no software to use with it. And that's why I don't understand those for whom the OS seems to be an end in itself.

To me, that makes very little sense...

I know THIS much. I've had more fun with Puppy this last decade than I had for the whole of the previous 30 years (ever since the start of the 'home computer' revolution in the early 80s). 'Nuff said!

(shrug...)

T'other Mike. ;)
 
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