What is the point of PuppyLinux?

[sleepingbear]

Well, what Puppy is intended to do is pretty clear if you bother to read Mr. Kauler's mission statement: http://www.puppylinux.com/. The "point" is an individual thing, it depends on what you want to do with it. For me, it's the last part of the statement that means the most: a complete distro that runs like wildfire on otherwise obsolete chipsets.

I'm currently running an Asus P5-B with a K6-III 450 and 256 mb RAM. Puppy runs like a greyhound on it. It boots faster from the HDD install than any other OS I've installed on my P4 and Athlon XP boxes. Both of those have much faster IDE setups and tons more memory and cache. Earlier I was downloading a Dot-Pup, listening to Pandora and exploring what's new in 2.01. Effortless multitasking. Try a similar set of tasks on this old gem with 2000, XP, or most other distros and you'll be experiencing wait states. Lots of them.

All the hardware either auto-configged or was handled by a wizard. No CLI intervention required. My mother could have set this up without help. Just read the directions and click the buttons. It's decidedly easier and faster to set up than any Windows release and most Linux distros.

Puppy let me revive an old laptop as well, a CTX P233. I use it with a wireless B card. It's very adequate for portable surfing and word processing. It was almost unusable before it met Puppy.

Both of these computers were throwaways. I got them for nothing. I love the way this computer works with Puppy. Fast, even by last year's standards, ultra stable, and hugely cost-effective. Thanks for considering my viewpoint

[marksouth2000]

It really makes no sense at all to make an accusation that paraphrases to..

Nor do we need to condescend with our understanding and knowledge.

Well, one certainly should not condescend without knowledge!

My original comment stands. The vulnerability of the wonderfully kind Puppy community we have here is that it people are reluctant to treat even obvious trolls as they deserve. It should be obvious to anyone with even a sliver of brain tissue left that a distro in the top 20 on Distrowatch is clearly usefult to rather a lot of people. Asking how people are using Puppy might have gotten a more positive response than a supercilious "what's the point of Puppy?"

OBTW, this answer would have been posted a month earlier if I hadn't been away on holiday, sunning myself, surfing the web wirelessly with my trusty 10-year old Puppy laptop.

[Runemaster]

You also have to remember that puppy is still somewhat in the developmental stages. But we still tell people about it trying to get more and more users everyday to switch, but personally my goal is to bring Microsoft to the point to where it is no more. Thats just me though. There are still quiete a few bugs left in puppy but for the most part they have been removed. Also I would like to address the naming of programs within puppy that itcomes with. Like I had no idea what gtkfind was when I first started off I was like "What in gods name is that?!?!?!". I think for more ease of use the programs should have more sensible names. thats what the 'about' button is for to show the author of the program and all those other goodies. not for their name to be all over the title of it. but thats just me.

[aoirthoir]

What's the point of puppy?

1. It runs my laptop widescreen no problem. (Ubuntu didnt recognize it, so I was stuck in1024x768 mode).

2. It recognizes all of my hardware (except maybe the bluetooth).

3. Networking is instantaneous. It even recognized my wifi. Though I've not tried to get on with it that way yet.

4. It runs FAST. Click ..and like Emeril says BAM! There is my program running.

5. Runs old stuff. I am going to be using it to set up a lot of cheap old computers for my friends.

6. Viruses schmiruses. It runs from a DVD/CD. Even saves back to it. If somehow a virus did get on (cough) when you boot up, you can ignore saved sessions.

7. Portable. Very portable. Though my DVD is configured for the laptop, I can transfer it to other computers and it will run just fine.

8. Open Source. Yes there is a cost savings (see 9), but we can, if we want, learn to tinker with it. Try tinkering with Fedora or Suse with no Nix experience.

9. 300 dollars for a pro version of puppy? No. The pro, enterprise, home model, are all the same cost. Ultimately affordable for one, five or fifty computers.

10. Professional level applications without a lot of clutter. Abiword, gnumeric, are fantastic. I needed to create a gantt chart for work. Found instructions for doing so in Excel online. But I was at home and do not have excel here. So I ran the entire thing in gnumeric.

11. Excellent Help desk. Give MS a call and see how much their support (lack of) costs. If you need something on Puppy, a post to the forums will find lots of folks willing to help.

12. It plays my CDs...and DVDs...Without skipping or jerking. Both of which happen in windows, though to its credit windows will play them out of the box. Fedora was a nightmare to get to play my CDs. No fast forward, no choosing songs. Yes it is probably an educational thing, I learn I do. But in Win and Pup I just hit next...done.

13. It is expandable. I can install programs on it as I choose. Lots of other distros fill the screen when you open their menues. Yes choice is nice but honestly I dont need fifteen text editors. (Heck I'd be happy to get rid of Vi and a couple others).

14. It just works. Like no other distro. (Other distros, even knoppix leave me with software that doesnt run, or hardware unrecognized, like DSL).

15. It's got a cute name that chicks dig. No chick cares if I am running Fedora, or OpenLinux. But if I am running the puppy, well.

[Pizzasgood]

Point 15 inspires me. I didn't think about this before. I knew the name "Puppy" wouldn't go over well witht the guys (not that I'm the type who gives a monkey), but I never though about the other implications. Maybe I should move my themes idea to a higher spot on my priority list. Same with simplification efforts. Prepare some "Poodle" edition disks. Hmmm.....

[aoirthoir]

That would be cool bro. We need printed DVDs..with little cute puppies. I love my puppy desktop.

Also those some kitties would be nice.

[1969912]

Its fun to play with. Good enough for me.

[aoirthoir]

Yet more reasons..

My desktop currently is set up with Kubuntu. I am going to be formatting the drive back to empty by this weekend. Maybe tonight if I get a little nap.

Anyhow...why am I doing this? Because puppy always loads my websites. Be it in Dillo, Mozilla (not a huge fan), or Firefox...it runs. With Konqueror I am getting a good half of my requests claiming no page or an error.

Also I am running more and more programs in the nature of portable apps. Like XAMPP. I am tired of dependencies with so many programs. I try to install something and it wont run because of a dependency. Most of my puppy stuff runs fine. Other things, I just make sure it is a program that comes with most everything I need...

For instance XAMPP....

Navicat...

Dataface.... (dataface requires PEAR and Smarty, but comes with them just in case).

I do have 2 gig of ram on this laptop and will experiment more with the machines at work...installing things to a ram drive and saving them back to the DVD. However for now..I just save to the Hard drive.

[JohnMc]

I have been using/fooling with some version of Linux since it's 0.9 days. Seen distros come and go. And have watched the WinTel consotrium grow fat. Yeah, Bill's bad, Ellison is a jerk, yada, yada. But that is really not it for me.

Its a matter of time. My time, not theirs. When the family moved into our new home I pitched the hardware firewall box attached to the broadband. The constant updating was killing my time. I spent 2 hours building a box out of old parts (200mmx PII, 60Gb drive, 256mb ram) and loaded ClarkConnect a RH linux derivative. That little baby gets security updates automatically. I might have to do manual intervention maybe 3-4 times a year. The last time I rebooted it was 8 months ago. I have returned a whole weekend of my time back to me of the past year. (By the way ClarkConnect does firewall/NAT, Samba, /Homes, MySQL, SSHd, etc. all in a nice single load package. Very nice. Apologize for the plug.)

But that still leaves me with the chore of getting rid of the 3 WinDoze clients (1 98, 1 2000, 1 XP) to get back my time yet again of having to keep those machines updated/patched. I considered using a distro like Ubuntu/Kubuntu. Its nice, and has a good interface and the Debian core means its solid. But it was too ponderous for my target audience -- technoluddite Wife and Daughter. The choice HAS TO BE SIMPLE.

I looked at Puppy back in the < 1.00 days and assessed it not quite ready yet. Good for a Unix knowledgeable person but not a newbie. Well I had to rebuild the 98 box 2 weeks ago after an attack. That was it. I took a look at Puppy 2.10 and found it vastly improved. The Pro CE variant rocks. I implemented a 'scorch Windows' policy and CDed both clients and unplugged the hard drives as a week long test. Now there was some initial 'How do I....". That was Sunday. Today is Thursday and I have had not a single wimper other than the ability to store vids from the daughter.

I will spend Saturday converting those two machines to a HD install of Puppy and not look back. And the time I will get back? At least the equivalent of 2 weeks time.

Its all about time -- my time.