Peppermint OS vs. Puppy Linux

[progrockfrog]

What do you guys think?

If a man had $5,000 to spend, should he invest in Puppy Linux? If so, i5, i7, i9?

Please tell me. I am trying to migrate from Linux Mint dominance. I thought Peppermint OS was the solution.

But alas, my hardies. I am struggling.

[mistfire]

What do you guys think?

If a man had $5,000 to spend, should he invest in Puppy Linux? If so, i5, i7, i9?

Please tell me. I am trying to migrate from Linux Mint dominance. I thought Peppermint OS was the solution.

But alas, my hardies. I am struggling.

It depends on your what to achieve. For general purpose i5 is sufficient enough. But it you are on VM's and compiling. i7 or i9 is the way to go.
You can try QuickPup64 or ManjaroPup64 for puppy experience

[geo_c]

Well, I'll say this.

I've used puppies for audio for over a decade. And they run well. But since the development of Kennel Linux distros, which have their own subsection here, I run all the jack audio apps on a pipewire based system with little to zero hassle whatsoever.

You can download an iso of KLV-airedale-SR17 here:viewtopic.php?p=143292#p143292

Although I'm still running KLV-airedale-SR12 because this distro is basically a frugal install of Void Linux which uses a rolling release model, so it's easy to update, and Void's updates are not bleeding edge, so they almost never break anything. Void has long shelf life.

If you do install, which is simply a matter of copying the iso files to a folder, having a working grub bootloader in place and adding a stanza to it which is generated by manually running a script in the download iso called wd_grubconfig then you are ready to boot it and set it up for audio work. (note: wd_grubconfig writes working boot stanzas to a text file called grub_config.txt, you have to manually copy the appropriate stanzas to your working grub.cfg)

once booted:
first update the system files with the terminal command: xbps-install -Syu

then what you do is install all the audio packages you want either using the gui package manager OctoXbps found in the applications menu or using a terminal command like this one:

Code: Select all

xbps-install tree testdisk lilypond musikcube timidity gpick parole helvum qpwgraph mediainfo drumstick hydrogen muse lsp-plugins yoshimi amsynth padthv1 samplv1 synthv1 drumkv1 guitarix2 helm swh-lv2 libjack-pipewire alsa-plugins alsa-plugins-ffmpeg gstreamer1-pipewire Carla calf ffmpegthumbnailer ardour x42-plugins neofetch poppler-utils mda-lv2 jack_mixer ranger micro lynx elinks w3m w3m-img newsboat openjdk21-jre calcurse neovim yazi qt6-base qt6-printsupport bat

I happen to have a lot of my favorite command line apps and other tools mixed in there. If you use the terminal command you need to know the correct package names of course. Not sure all those in my example are 100% correct, but I think they are. if you're not sure you can always use OctoXbps and choose your packages there.

Then if you want to run jack apps, you'll notice in the list I have libjack-pipewire installed, you'll need that to run jack stuff. Also when you start a jack app up you'll need to start it with the command pw-jack [APP-NAME]
note: it's possible @rockedge has libjack-pipewire already installed on SR-17, which can be checked in the gui OctoXbps package manager.

I have a set of desktop files that start my jack apps with that command and I copy them to /usr/share/applications so they show up in the application menus.

That's it. It should run for you. This distro uses Xfce-desktop and pipewire. Wayland is installed but Xfce runs on xorg.

There are other Kennel Distros that run KDE-Plasma/wayland, and they don't run as root like KLV-Airedale and puppies, they run as user spot. They are both Void distros and Arch distros.

[bigpup]

If a man had $5,000 to spend, should he invest in Puppy Linux? If so, i5, i7, i9?

Save about $4500 and spend around $500 on a maybe i3 or i5 computer with at least 4 to 8 GB of memory.

Puppy Linux will fly on it for doing any normal stuff.

I just put Puppy on a laptop with an i3 CPU, 8GB memory, SSD drive, Intel graphics. $120 open box return.
I think having Widows 10S on it was why it was returned.
Overkill as needed hardware to run Puppy!
I really see little difference from much lower spec hardware.
SSD speed does run faster than a disk hard drive, but only when doing boot up.
Everything is already in RAM, except software you install.

If you are going to do high demand processes and not normal stuff.
The more hardware power the better.

[ozsouth]

Agree with bigpup. I have a recent Celeron for normal use, & an i5 with 12Gb ram & a SSD for compiling.
If you do heavy stuff (video/audio editing, VMs, compiling) an i5 rig is definitely worthwhile.

[geo_c]

i5 with 16GB of ram is plenty to do heavy audio. I wouldn't recommend i3, Ram is important though, 8GB of ram fills up fast when using a lot of plugins in audio mixing. Most plugins are total ram hogs.

[esos]

I would choose Mxlinux instead of peppermint.
Mx is flexible, frugal/direct isobooting with persistence.(behave like puppylinux) or fullinstall(but you need extra partition).
Remaster custom iso is always successful.
Plenty of apps.

[mikeslr]

@progrockfrog

Good advice given above. The most important of which is 'the more RAM, the better'. Puppys and KLs operate differently than most distros. To a large extent, they 'Run-in-RAM'. Read, viewtopic.php?t=5818 and viewtopic.php?t=6526.

There are many Puppys to choose from; and beyond those this Forum supports other 'small', 'portable' operating systems such as the KLs and debian/Ubuntu 'Dogs'. Each offering has some advantage, some special features not built-in to others. Puppy is a 'do-archy': everyone has the right to pursue his or her personal interest and offer the result to whoever wants it. And we get the benefit of those creations to use 'OOTB' or 'flesh-out' as we see fit.

From geo_c's post you can tell where his interest lies. As bigpup post may suggest, for 'normal stuff' Puppy Linux will fly on computers which may be considered 'under-powered' by current standards. But what are your interests, you're computing objectives?

With Puppy Linux and its companions you can save most of the $5,000 for hard-ware. If you feel compelled to spend it, donate it to organizations dedicated to keeping the Web, information on the Web and Software free.

[wiak]

Please tell me. I am trying to migrate from Linux Mint dominance. I thought Peppermint OS was the solution.

Depends why you want to migrate from Linux Mint; I use the xfce variant of that much of the time and find it a great distro.

However, by default it is large and a full install and we can take a KL and build it up to be very similar to Linux Mint (whether using apt/dpkg or Void repos), but in a tidy easy to understand and manage size with all the many frugal install additional advantages should these be important to you. So why the likes of PeppermintOS (or MX Linux for that matter). The home grown KL distros can do just as nicely and several variants of these probably even better. Puppy may be fine too; certainly fast... but whether suitable for your purposes depends on what you want to do with it and how easily you need it to reliably install new packages, and whether running as root user most of the time is going to be problematic.

Linux Mint is great though, and I run it because it is used in our business and I don't have time to continually switch back and forth. No I don't use KL distros in our family business (though I used to use the earlier WDL_Arch for that - no reason not to really, but prefer a larger dev team effort just in case that makes that distro slightly more secure (which it probably doesn't). Really I'd prefer to use a KL since all the frugal install marvel tricks are sorely missed by me when on full install Linux Mint, but what is 'special' about PeppermintOS, in terms of what it offers anyway?

[bigpup]

All the talk about having as much RAM as possible.

A Puppy Linux version, fully booted to a working desktop, and loaded into RAM, is using around 300 to 800 MB (depends on the version).

The programs you are going to run are what uses more RAM.

I am posting this from a Puppy version with Pale Moon browser running.
Actual Used RAM: 397 MB Used - (buffers + cached)

[Geek3579]

I would choose Mxlinux instead of peppermint.
Mx is flexible, frugal/direct isobooting with persistence.(behave like puppylinux) or fullinstall(but you need extra partition).
Remaster custom iso is always successful.
Plenty of apps.

I agree. MX-Linux does install as a frugal and runs exceptionally well. However, it took me a while to find out how to install it. It is really meant as a full install using 1 or 2 partitions beside boot. t has a fabulous package manager that just works and a very helpful forum. If you want a robust full featured daily driver it works well.

The advantage of Puppy Linux is that it is easy to install several different frugal installations, OR/AND have any number of save folders for any installation. MUCH more flexible than MX-Linux, IMHO.

[esos]

Alternative:
Porteux v2.0 kernel 6.14.0, under 750MB-ram, under 500MB-iso
Frugal or direct isobooting with persistence.

[wiak]

Alternative:
Porteux v2.0 kernel 6.14.0, under 750MB-ram, under 500MB-iso
Frugal or direct isobooting with persistence.

Porteus is okay. It's a clever design, and I've often given it a try as the years go by, but it is not quite ever what I myself want, but fine if you do.
Having said that, this forum has several distros that can do everything Porteus can do, so why advocate for Porteus here, or for MX Linux for that matter?
Not that it matters since those that love what Puppy gives them will continue using it as long as it remains developed, those who love DebianDogs have had and continue to have great service for over a decade on a great wee distro, those who love KL distros, which can be build in so many different forms with great package management and with and without systemd will continue to use that.

Main thing is that this forum itself remains an active place and the more people using any of the distros here the better. If I were on the Porteus or MX Linux forums I would make similar statements, but I'm not there, I'm here.

I also have a bit of a killing small fast little Wayland Sway Ubuntu-based KL distro that I wish I had time to finish and release. I just don't (and part of the problem is also that I have forgotten a lot about Sway installation despite my son still using an old Void Linux based KL Sway I made long time back. The comparison between distros using Wayland and those using the likes of great little XFCE is certainly interesting and KDE Plasma is pretty speedy nowadays too for those who don't like tiling per se.

[rockedge]

old Void Linux based KL Sway

I have one or two ISO's maybe more.......of KLV-Sway variants. Inspired the attempt that eventually became KLV-Spectr-sr4

[geo_c]

The comparison between distros using Wayland and those using the likes of great little XFCE is certainly interesting and KDE Plasma is pretty speedy nowadays too for those who don't like tiling per se.

I can't say that I notice any difference at all between the xorg based distros I run and the wayland. It seems to me the difference is more of an under the hood factor, in terms of programming and future frameworks. It doesn't seem to be faster, or cleaner or anything like that on a normal home monitor.

But maybe if I was a video editor with expensive video interfaces I'd notice.

edit: but maybe as @rockedge mentions Sway inspiring spectr, is there sway under the hood of spectr? I thought it was running X, and maybe it defaults to one or the other based on hardware?

[rockedge]

@geo_c

Spectrwm is not based on Sway.

Sway does have some of the same features, but as far as I know Spectrwm is only Xorg - X11 capable. There are similarities between Sway (Wayland) and Spectrwm (Xorg - X11) as far as the features, navigation and the basic operation of a tiling window manager

[geo_c]

@geo_c

Spectrwm is not based on Sway.

Sway does have some of the same features, but as far as I know Spectrwm is only Xorg - X11 capable. There are similarities between Sway (Wayland) and Spectrwm (Xorg - X11) as far as the features, navigation and the basic operation of a tiling window manager

I've pointed this out in the past and I'll say it here. Spectrwm for some reason displays the most vibrant colors of all of them, KDE-Plasma included. I've wondered what could be the cause of that, or if it's just my imagination.

[wiak]

The comparison between distros using Wayland and those using the likes of great little XFCE is certainly interesting and KDE Plasma is pretty speedy nowadays too for those who don't like tiling per se.

I can't say that I notice any difference at all between the xorg based distros I run and the wayland. It seems to me the difference is more of an under the hood factor, in terms of programming and future frameworks.

Generally speaking and in most setups there probably isn't anything any user would find beneficial using Wayland instead of X in my opinion. But, Wayland is overall said to be more efficient on resources, and were it not for all the bulky libraries most distros need anyway, core Wayland is really quite small. I discovered, that core Wayland allows the building of a much smaller distro nowadays if I use Sway as the compositor (because Sway itself doesn't need much in the way of dependencies). On the otherhand if you use Wayland with say KDE-Plasma you will not be able to produce a particularly tiny distro - hence my personal interest in using Wayland+Sway since nice to have a core relatively tiny distro since that can later be used for making one-job type distros that remain small and for virtual machine use where size and resource efficiency is important. The wee Ubuntu Noble distro I have basically working, but not configured as yet, is thus of variety Wayland + Sway and it is "small" in size and efficient in resource usage moreover. I'll find time to get back to that sometime... and then release it whatever state it is in since others can complete such config polishing anyway.

[progrockfrog]

I got a computer yesterday. How do I install Puppy Linux on it? I have a mouse, a keyboard, and a monitor warm until I see a good answer. It better be good.

[Geek3579]

I got a computer yesterday. How do I install Puppy Linux on it? I have a mouse, a keyboard, and a monitor warm until I see a good answer. It better be good.

This is only a short answer, and only ONE of several possible methods, but it may be a start. You need up to two USBs which will be wiped and rewritten.
IMHO, the easiest and safest way to install puppy linux is on a USB, leaving your existing HDD untouched.

1) Download the appropriate ISO* (~500MB), and burn it to a CD, or preferably a USB.
I suggest Bookworm 64, which has Frugalpup Installer OOTB, (find it here: https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/)
If you dont have a CDROM drive, use RUFUS running in windows to burn the iso to USB(1)

2) Boot the CD/USB(1). This should be done by choosing the CD/USB(1) device at boot time.
( more details can be found elsewhere, including how to turn off secure boot...sorry, I'm only giving am outline)
Load the ISO* you used before into the host computer, say in the Desktop folder for use in step 3.

3) Plug in the target USB(2) on which the install will be done.
Run Menu --> Setup --> Frugalpup Installer --> Stickpup ( which will ONLY install to a USB, in this case USB(2), if selected correctly.
Select the ISO* for booting when requested.

4) Boot the newly installed USB(2). Trash USB(1) or wipe if you can. Some ISO burns seem permanent.

More information including other methods can be found here: https://www.forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=8576

My personal method is to boot the ISO* in a virtual machine and install to a USB, but that requires more specific knowledge about the use of VMs.

[Wiz57]

Would help to get better answers if we had some idea of what your computer is...laptop/desktop? How much memory (RAM)?
What size storage drive, and type (HDD, SSD, NVME) or if it has one. Ports? USB, which type (A,B,C, etc))
For myself on my old Acer Aspire One AOA150, the easiest way to "install" Puppy was to use an old Windows (had XP) installer
to make the directory and put the grub4dos bootloader (grldr) on the C: drive and modify the boot.ini to what is needed
to boot either Puppy or WinXP...in my case I used a Slacko 6.3 32bit installer that runs while booted to XP, slacko6.3.exe.
Once I had that installed, frugal install I might add, further frugal installs are a simple matter of making a new directory
on the HDD, name it similar to the name of the Pup you desire, then use something like pExtract (in Puppy) or 7Zip in
WinXP to extract all contents of the downloaded Puppy ISO file into that directory (folder). Then just edit the menu.lst
file that is made with slacko installer using a text editor to add boot stanzas for the newly "installed" Puppy. Adding
the boot stanza is a simple matter of copy and paste the ones written for the old Slacko, but after you paste your change
the name of the new installed Puppy, change the appropriate directory references to tell grldr where the new Pup files
are located. Save the menu.lst, then reboot...your newly "installed" Puppy should show as an option.
Grub2 is similar, but you edit grub.cfg with text editor OR use grub2config available in the Forum.

[progrockfrog]

Well, you guys seem to be so concerned about my USB status.

[progrockfrog]

Let me know when I should open them. I also have some 2.0s.

[progrockfrog]

in my case I used a Slacko 6.3 32bit installer that runs while booted to XP, slacko6.3.exe.
Once I had that installed, frugal install I might add, further frugal installs are a simple matter of making a new directory
on the HDD

I thought .exe stuff was for the Windows nerds. How do I employ USB 3.0 Hulk power on these lords who want to own us? I don't want to use Windows 11. I don't want to succumb to Linux Mint smelly farts.

I want to have my own ecstasy.

I think it could be from smelling puppy linux bums. Do you not agree? How does a Slacko thingamajiggy work on a 2.0 USB stick I already have lying around?

[Wiz57]

@progrockfrog
If you are NOT going to read those How-To pages, I'm through trying to help...fend for yourself...
I specifically said "In my case" did I not? Reading is Fundamental, if you don't want to share any of
the specs of this alleged computer, then you deal with it. This is what was meant by the "Help Vampire"
thread, and could very well be WHY you were banned from Linux Mint Forum! Anyway, that's all, I'm
done with you, if someone else wants to get tangled up in a never ending bad Twilight Zone episode,
they can have at it!