I started with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS "Trusty Tahr". Kept that for around 8 months or so, while distro-hopping & trying a few others (as you do). I'd already looked at Puppy a couple of times, without much success.....the frugal concept took a bit of getting used to!
Then, in the November of 2014, Canonical made my mind up FOR me. Their 'custom' kernel dropped support for the very elderly ATI graphics chip in my desktop rig, and multiple daily crashes became the order of the day. Overnight, Ubuntu - with Unity's hardware acceleration requirements - became all but unusable.
Most of my other trial distros, being 'buntu-based, suffered the same kernel graphics driver issue... (
sigh)
No matter. Although I'd tried a few other lightweight distros, I hadn't seen anything that really appealed to me. Despite limited success with Puppy, I still liked the concept. Then
sudodus, one of the mods over at the Ubuntu Forums, suggested I take a look at the then newly-released community build of
Tahrpup 6.0 CE. This was the very first Puppy that was totally community-built, using the relatively new Woof-CE build-system, after Barry had stepped-down as 'benevolent dictator' to concentrate on his own projects. So I did, annnd.....it was the first Puppy that worked 100%, OOTB, on both the Compaq rig AND the anciente Dell Inspiron lappie.
That was it. Bye-bye, mainstream! I've been there ever since.....
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It takes a special kind of 'nutter' to really get into the Puppy ecosphere, the way that I've done.....but with
- The fact of the 'frugal' Puppy being able to run from uniquely-named sub-directories within the same partition, and
- The infrastructure of 'portable' applications that I - along with the valuable assistance of several other Puppy community members - have developed
.....Puppy just 'works' for me. And works
really well.
"Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks..." But that's the great thing about Linux; with a bit of patience - and searching - there's a distro out there for everyone. (And if you don't like ANY of the available offerings, you can always step up to the next level.....and build your own).
Can't do that with either Windows OR MacOS.
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@wendy-lebaron :- Yup, ROX
does take some getting used to. But once it's been mastered, many of us in the community wouldn't even consider anything else. It's the closest in concept, actually, to the original drag'n'drop system pioneered by Windows, and honed to perfection in Win XP & 7. And that was one of the very few things I really liked about XP...
Mike.
