I am impressed with puppy. A friend has been trying to revive an old
Dell (about 10 years old) with little result using Ubuntu. I downloaded
precise puppy and played a little with it and came to these conclusions.
by the way his machine is working great now with puppy.
With puppy you can go back to small system requirements without going
backwards on support for newer equipment. Because many retired people
are working on a real budget, having to upgrade equipment to stay up to
date and secure is a real hardship. I know that secure is not generally
accepted when running as root, but not near as bad as M$, so is a good
trade off.
I installed it on a 4Gig flash drive. I removed the hard drive from my
machine. inserted an SD card in the netbooks slot. I then booted from
the flash and played with the computer. Talk about a great thing for
trips where powering the computer is an issue. I was thinking of a
tablet but now will see how long the netbook battery will last.
Even loading the OS into RAM rather than running from the flash, is fast
on boot up. The lite apps are really fast from the icon click to open
program window.
The direction of puppy to me is great. It uses gnome and many programs
that most users feel are falling behind. But the kernel is modern and up
to date. Unlike the competitor M$ that fails to support old OSs they
have pushed off on people. Linux of the puppy persuasion considers users
of older equipment that feel a safe working computer is better than no
computer at all, an option that limited income forces on many people.