Vanilla Dpup vs Puppy Tradition

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dimkr
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Vanilla Dpup vs Puppy Tradition

Post by dimkr »

  • Traditionally, Puppy releases are one-off releases; Vanilla Dpup has weekly releases with stability and security fixes from woof-CE and Debian; you decide if and when to update

  • Traditionally, Puppy uses a small kernel package, and many drivers are omitted in the name of size; Vanilla Dpup's kernel is extremely similar to the Debian kernel, and it even ships with VAAPI drivers preinstalled, for hardware-accelerated decoding of online videos

  • Traditionally, Puppy users must load a kernel sources SFS to install out-of-tree drivers; Vanilla Dpup supports DKMS (Debian's out-of-tree driver building infrastructure) and comes with a small subset of the sources SFS that gets updated together with the kernel, allowing you to apt install extra drivers (like NVIDIA drivers) the Debian way, and they will get automatically rebuilt on every kernel update

  • Traditionally, Puppy uses PPM for package management; Vanilla Dpup also includes APT and Flatpak; it uses the same directory layout as Debian, making it easy to install non-free applications shipped as a .deb package (like Chrome or Vivaldi) or additional non-free firmware, and it's safe to install 32-bit software (like Steam or Wine) on a 64-bit Vanilla Dpup, but at the same time, this makes Vanilla Dpup incompatible with some SFSs that assume the traditional Puppy layout (those with /bin, /sbin, /lib or /lib64 directories)

  • Traditionally, a Puppy release is based, at least partially, on .pet packages; Vanilla Dpup has zero preinstalled .pet packages (because everything comes from Debian or gets built from source during the build process) and its build system is publicly available, making Vanilla Dpup fully reproducible and easy to fork

  • Traditionally, Puppy doesn't have Bluetooth support out-of-the-box; in Vanilla Dpup, Bluetooth audio works out-of-the-box and PulseAudio or PipeWire (>= 10.0.x) works seamlessly even for applications running as spot

  • Traditionally, Puppy uses gtkdialog-based tools SNS for network management; Vanilla Dpup replaces them with ConnMan and GTK+ 3 based frontends

  • Traditionally, Puppy uses old GTK+ 2 applications and GTK+ 3 applications like modern browsers look different; in Vanilla Dpup, all applications that support both GTK+ 2 and 3 are built against GTK+ 3, and the included themes support GTK+ 2 and 3 equally

  • Traditionally, Puppy uses the default font rendering settings; the Vanilla Dpup defaults are similar to what you can find on a clean Xfce installation (hinting is disabled)

  • Traditionally, Puppy uses glibc's default memory allocation settings; Vanilla Dpup uses the RAM Saver to reduce waste of RAM - together with zram swap, Vanilla Dpup should work exceptionally well on computers with 1-2 GB of RAM

  • Traditionally, Puppy uses xz compression for SFSs, in the name of smaller size; Vanilla Dpup uses zstd, increasing size by 8-15%, but decompression is so much faster and CPU consumption is lower: this makes Vanilla Dpup a great fit for old, single or dual core CPUs that struggle with decompression and need many seconds to start a browser

  • Traditionally, Puppy uses aufs; Vanilla Dpup (>= 9.3.x) uses overlay instead, to avoid large out-of-tree kernel patches that may break or reach their EOL shortly, and supports simulated dynamic SFS loading under PUPMODE 5 and 13

  • Traditionally, all applications run as root; in Vanilla Dpup, the display server (X.Org, the compositor and Xwayland) and internet-facing applications like Firefox or Transmission are pre-configured to run as spot, for additional security and reduced impact of newly-discovered security vulnerabilities

  • Traditionally, Puppy's spot user is not hardened to prevent code execution as root; in Vanilla Dpup, applications running as spot cannot gain root privileges via vulnerable SUID binaries and a Landlock-based sandbox (in >=10.0.x) prevents spot from writing to /root even if the permissions of /root are changed to 777

  • Traditionally, Puppy comes with a firewall and an ad blocker, but they're disabled by default; in Vanilla Dpup, they're enabled

  • Traditionally, the preinstalled browser in Puppy is mostly as-is; in Vanilla Dpup, Firefox is pre-configured to reduce annoyances, increase privacy and disable unwanted features like Pocket

  • Traditionally, Puppy has no DNS cache, and often, the browser has to query the address of a website multiple times while you browse it; Vanilla Dpup has unscd preinstalled and enabled: it eats very little RAM but makes browsing much faster

  • Traditionally, Puppy comes with a tiny selection of fonts and some websites look weird; Vanilla Dpup comes with extra fonts and websites appear normal

  • Traditionally, Puppy is not advanced-user-friendly; Vanilla Dpup supports shell completion, vi is included, man pages are included, and so on

  • Traditionally, Puppy is not keyboard friendly; Vanilla Dpup comes with many keyboard shortcuts, some are inspired by other distros or OSs, so the learning curve is small

  • Traditionally, Puppy is English-only; Vanilla Dpup (>= 9.3.x) comes with translations, CJK fonts and even documentation built-in; users who don't need these extras can remove these extra SFSs

(Derivatives of Vanilla Dpup and "sister" distros may include all, some or none of these features - consult your distro's release notes if unsure)



Last bumped by dimkr on Thu Feb 02, 2023 6:21 pm.
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