@RealGomer :-
Welcome to the forums.
Fossapup64 9.5 - the original release of this, and Puppy dev
666philb's 'swan-song' - was the mutt's nuts in terms of compatibility with so much modern stuff. Of course, it too was 'cursed' with the PPM.....but in my view, Synaptic is NOT so much an improvement as just a different kind of hell. ATM, Fossapup is being 'spun off' in half-a-dozen different directions, and frankly the 'Development' section of the Puppy Forums is becoming an untidy, hard-to-navigate mess of almost-but-not-quite-the-same versions. It's very confusing!
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So; what else can we tempt you with? Ah.....
I know.
You
may perhaps like to take a look at the "Kennel Linux" series the community has been working on for well over a year now. It's the first time a truly modern member of the Puppy family has been developed by a team collaborating together, as opposed to the usual individual devs.
My recommendation would be the first of this series, KLV "Airedale".....based around Void Linux - a "first" for the community - and sporting the XFCE/Thunar combo. There's a GUI 'frontend' to the Void Linux xbps PM - called OctoXBPS - which although similar in appearance and operation to Synaptic, is IMHO slicker and more intuitive. Currently, this is up to
rc10.1 - with
rc11 in the works (very close to stable)......and as far as
I'm concerned, the "cherry on the cake" is that nearly the entire range of 'portable' browsers/other apps I developed for Puppy itself will ALSO run in KLV without fuss. This makes it super quick'n'esy to set-up and get going.
forum.puppylinux.com
forum.puppylinux.com
It's an acquired taste, but it's well worth investigating. My circumstances are vastly different to yours; with a 4 GHz quad-core and 32 GB RAM, I could run almost anything I wanted to.....but nothing would EVER compel me to run *you-know-what* (too annoying) OR its competitor from Cupertino (too expensive and 'locked-down'). I stick with Puppy 'cos I know it so well; frankly, there's precious few mainstream distros I'd give houseroom to at the end of the day, though I've had an install of Zorin on an external HDD for some years....I just like what brothers Artyom & Kyrill have done with it. I'm experimenting with Porteus at the moment, and have played around with Slax in the past, too.
Personally, I still think you've got to go a long way to find an "all-round" lightweight distro as versatile and bullet-proof as "our Pup". But of course.....I'm biased..!
Mike.
