Fossa9.5 or F96-CE for old machine?

[amethyst]

I've tested both extensively and I think Fossa9.5 is much ligfhter on resources and would suite an older machine (2Gb RAM) much better. In F96-CE pulseaudio, conky an conman are resource hungry. You can of course disable conky at startup which will help a bit. I think you can also disable conman and use network wizard instead. If you go Fossa9.5, you can (should) disable qbat and picom at startup too if you have limited resources. The latter also use lot of resources. Fossa9.5 is just more responsive on my older machine.

[bigpup]

This is a good example of why there are always several different versions of Puppy to choose from.

No one Puppy version is ever going to work the best on all possible computers.

Has always been a problem picking the best Puppy version for the specific computer.

Latest version software and Linux kernel are going to be coded to use features of newer or very new hardware.
Stuff older hardware may not provide or provide fully.

The days of having software in Puppy Linux, that is tightly coded to only do exactly what the program is for, and only using the lowest amount of code to do it, is over.

In the days when a lot of Puppy specific programs, were being developed or even making a pet package of a program to add.
A lot of time was spent trimming down the code or removing not really needed stuff from the pet package.

Not really seeing this now in very new offerings on this forum.

It seems more about what can be put into the operating system with no effort to limit the size, ram usage, etc.........

For sure, the latest Linux kernel is not configured or coded to operate very old hardware the best way.
Support for the latest hardware is the main thing driving development of the latest Linux kernel.
They do drop very old hardware support at some point, but it is not based on a set time period or point in kernel development.

Puppy did have Pwidgets that did the same thing Conky does, only better.
But Pwidgets did not keep up with changes in Puppy, but with some code changes, could probably come back to being very useful.
https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=322

[amethyst]

May even downgrade to Bionic64 just to have a 64-bit Puppy with an old Tahr64 kernel for the very rare cases 64-bit is required. Not really bothered with 64-bit since I use Bionic32 all the time.