Just curious to gather thoughts on Puppy Linux, or derivatives like Lighthouse Pup
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).

I’m sure many people on this forum have used or tried Puppy (it’s listed as an influence on AntiX)

I have sampled it ever since version 2, and generally love it, but a few flaws have kept me from using it as a permanent OS solution:

- Puppy is rightly famous for packing many programs into a relatively small ISO, but when using the system .... there is just ..... so MUCH stuff! The menus and desktop are very cluttered, and the available programs are listed by program name. (function is not always apparent, partly because several of these programs are unique to Puppy). The Lighthouse derivative is especially stuffed.

- Puppy’s unique ideas on packaging and installing might be off-putting to newer users who are already leery about Linux. Examples:

=> At boot, Lighthouse kept asking about “SFS,” which seemed to be meta-packages related to stuff like Firefox, XFCE, etc. I think I understood what was going on, but was still confusing, and much more involved than most Live CDs
=> I think Puppy has it’s own packages (which make program availability a concern), but depending on version, seems to have some compatibility with Ubuntu. Or Slackware. Hmmm..

- Biggest problem - until now, I have NEVER been able to connect to the Internet with Puppy - even with hard-wired connection. I think most major distros have automatically picked up wired connections for about 5 years now. Good news - with Lighthouse, I was able to use Frisbee to connect to my wireless network!

Having said all of this ... Puppy (and derivatives) is incredible, and is among the best examples of the creativity, ingenuity, and right-to-choose of Linux developers.

It’s an understatement to say the Lighthouse derivative is “feature-rich”. For example, there’s at least 5 fully-configured window managers available!