Older distros, Can I use them?

[mivison]

Is it ok to use older distos? if so, what are the draw backs?

[bigpup]

If you are asking about using older versions of Puppy Linux.
Sure you can use them.
However, you may run into programs you add, that will not run.
Especially, newer versions of browsers.
Why?
The needed dependency files and programs, are too old or not even in the older Puppy version.

All the programs, that come already in the Puppy version, are going to work.
But, they will probably be older versions of everything.

Also, a lot of improvements, to everything in Puppy, have been made over the years.
Older versions will not have those improvements.

No harm in trying an older Puppy version and see if it is providing what you want.
There are some programs in Puppy that have not needed changing for a very long time.
Puppy is very much about, if it is working, do not fix it.

Hardware is important.
Older versions of Puppy Linux, are not going to have support, for very new hardware.
Hard to build in support, for hardware that did not exist, when the Puppy version was developed.
All versions of Puppy, try their best, to still support older hardware.
Very new hardware, is only going to get good support, from the very newest Puppy versions.

[s243a]

How old are we talking? I don't think most people are using any puppy much older then precise although it wasn't long ago that there were a fair number of Warry and superlupa (AKA lucid revitalized) users. In either case there were tricks to get newer browsers working. Upgrades were done to the original puppy such as either upgrading glibc or having a new gligc in a separate folder and using LD_PRELOAD (see glibc tweak).

It was the case that older puppies were leaner and while size wise this is true a number of efficiency improvements have been made recently (post xenial) to make up for size increases. For older machines I recommend dpup buster (either Joseph's or rackedy's version). On older machines you might be running a puppy in ram to make up for slow IO speed or perhaps you no longer have a hard drive. Under such a scenario if you install too many packages you might take a performance hit. One solution might be to run larger applications in a chroot that uses the physical drive as the read write layer rather than ram since ram will be at a premium on older machines.

P.S. has a version of firefox with watchdog's glibc tweak. See post:
viewtopic.php?p=7018#p7018

this might be a good browser choicer for older versions of puppy. Darry has posted some versions of palemoon with this teak in the following post:
http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... 80#1020380

The following note might be relevant to the glic tweak:

I think it would not work because there also is a glibc tweak for the plugin-container: the original plugin-container is renamed plugin-container-exec and plugin-container is a script with glibc tweak in order to use the included up-to-date flashplayer. The update process of seamonkey could be done manually or by a script.

http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic. ... abb#962791

As a final note an older puppy might need updated certificates and maybe openssl libs for some internet sites to work.