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Comment by schemescape | Hacker News Reader

Puppy Linux would be my first choice today, but it’s just a personal preference.

I tried a couple of puppies on my ThinkPad Z13 (Ryzen 6000 series) and couldn't get it to start X no matter what I tried. Eventually even one of the puppy devs (for QuickPup) gave up on my issue.

No other distro has this issue on my laptop, but then again, they all use/support Wayland.

Is there a Puppy out there that uses Wayland?

Vanilla Dpup (https://vanilla-dpup.github.io/) has an Xwayland version. It is based on Debian 12 and uses its default kernel version 6.1.x, so it should support newer hardware.

Unofficial Puppy Linux derivatives are not very easy to discover. I found Vanilla Dpup by sheer luck on GitHub yesterday. (I had contributed to a previous distro by the same developer and was going through my PR and issue history.) After about an hour of testing, it seems to be the most practically usable current Puppy variant. (I am comparing it to https://debiandog.github.io/doglinux/ and the official FossaPup64. I haven't tried the official Slackware 15 version.) It's a shame I didn't know about it when I needed a live USB a month earlier.

I like how it has a 2000s-retro GUI theme that looks inspired by Puppy Linux 4, my favorite version in terms of visual design. Compare https://github.com/vanilla-dpup/vanilla-dpup.github.io/blob/... and https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/40/Puppy_Li....

Agree on Puppy. I had that running off USB for some old laptops and it did quite well. I used to love Crunchbang for this sort of purpose.

https://crunchbang.org/

Puppy is great though.

Is Puppy still maintained? Barry Kauler moved onto EasyOS.

Yes, very much so. With multiple "flavours" based on debian, ubuntu, slackware or void.

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