A beginner's thoughts on Puppy Linux

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Maxiwuff
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A beginner's thoughts on Puppy Linux

Post by Maxiwuff »

Just wanted to share my initial thoughts on this OS, from a perspective of a complete beginner.

My original idea was to finally start my journey with Linux and prepare to leave Windows for good, or at least erase it from my daily system. Got a laptop, and thought it would be a good start. And here is what I think:

Upsides:
I generally like how everything looks here, things in the UI seems intuitive and easy to use, I could get neofetch to work and customise it to my own liking, discord runs without any issues, and the system works lightning fast! I would daily use it for everything, but..

Downsides:
Getting Steam to work was possible, but I would lack some functionality, unable to use Proton fully... Even getting closely listening to the forum on what to do would bring little improvement, and doing anything so advanced myself was a bit above me. Also noone I know irl or via internet I can easily reach out to knows how to do things the Puppy way, and pretty much they keep telling me to use something else. So I have not tried any games here yet either. Repositories are... whatever "puppy-noarch" is, seems to offer little of what I want or what apparently other repos have (or that's what I've been told)

Conclusion:
I like the aesthetic and I do not want to say farewell to it... so I am thinking about getting something like Mint or whatever to play games and learn the... mainstream Linux, and keep Puppy as anything not game related, try to daily use it like before while learning the system. Might even take a small break so I learn the normal Linux and come back here once I have some basic knowledge, who knows.

dimkr
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Re: Thoughts on Puppy

Post by dimkr »

Steam is indeed becoming harder to use on Puppy, all big distro switched away from X.Org already and many users use Flatpak to run Steam, making Puppy an odd case. If you want to share more details, I can help you get it working, and I can promise the situation will improve in Vanilla Dpup 11.0.x because Steam already works great in development builds.

Maxiwuff
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Re: Thoughts on Puppy

Post by Maxiwuff »

I tried to get Steam to work, posting my struggles on a separate topic "Steam on Vanilla Dpup?". I bet that as the development goes forward the system will be easier to use and I am looking forward to it myself, I would not want to just leave it be. Before I try again though, I need to get a new version of the system anyway... should I keep using 10.0.x or try 11.0.x? Nothing of value will be kept on it until I know I won't make the system unusable by accident :lol:

dimkr
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Re: Thoughts on Puppy

Post by dimkr »

11.0.x is in very early development, things break very often and it's very very different from 10.0.x, although some things already work well and better than they used to. It will be released only when Debian 13 is out.

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