Hello,
@paolo .
Primarily - and traditionally - Puppy has always been based around one of three mainstream distros:-
- Ubuntu
- Slackware, and
- Debian
The "Slacko" Puppies are no longer getting much in the way of development. Their developer, Mick Amadio, took over as Puppy Chief Steward when Barry Kauler stepped-down from his role as "benevolent dictator" and handed the reins over to the Puppy community.
In recent years, Mick's life has took him in a very different direction, and he's a rare visitor to the Puppy Forum these days. Nobody has, to date, took over full-time development of "Slacko". However, community member
peebee has some Slackware-based projects he is keeping up-to-date & maintained, so it's not a complete bust by any means.
This leaves Debian & Ubuntu. Most newer Pups are invariably based around the latter, although our primary Woof-CE contributor,
Dima Krasner, has a side-project going that he calls
Vanilla DPup. This is based on Debian 'stable'.....currently "Bookworm".
(Woof-CE is the Github-hosted 'Puppy-builder' project, which will let the user choose a distro to create a Puppy from. You set it up, and hit 'Go'......and Woof-CE will take in a mainstream distro at one end, and spit out a Puppy built from it at t'other end.)
It works, too!
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Puppies have always used Xorg, ALSA, and the ROX-filer/JWM window manager combo to create their "desktop environment". Dima is trying to modernize this, by building Vanilla DPup to utilise Wayland, Pipewire , and the Synaptic package manager that most are familiar with. He wants to bring Puppy into the modern world, so that it has a viable future, because even stuff like PulseAudio is now getting long in the tooth, and is considered by some to be 'old hat'.
Dima keeps these up-to-date with a vengeance. Most Puppies have always been essentially a frozen 'snapshot in time'. Because they're so small, if you want newer versions of stuff, you simply upgrade to the newer build; it's for this reason that Puppy doesn't usually have an 'updater' as such. Upgrading is a 5-minute job, and is pretty simple once you understand the process. Vanilla DPup, however, regularly receives Debian updates & security/bugfixes.
The main community Forum, where everything is hosted, is here:-
Main Puppy Forum
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There's also the "Kennel Linux" project. This is based on a 'build-script' called "FirstRib", from one of our senior members, Will McEwan, and will again take a mainstream distro at one end, and at the other end pop-out a 'frugal' Puppy-type installation. These usually are based around the XFCE /Thunar combo. Our Admin,
rockedge, is primarily responsible for and behind major development of this. It uses overlayfs instead of traditional aufs, because the maintainer of aufs is no longer really keeping up with the necessary kernel patches.
KLV-'Airedale' is the most mature of these, and having been developed from the ground up via Will's 'FirstRib' build-script, is already onto it's 3rd 'stable' release. It's well worth a look.
Kennel Linux Project
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Then, there's the 'DebianDogs' and 'UbuntuDogs'. These are developed and maintained by our Dutch member, fredx181, and are based around the Debian or Ubuntu 'Live' session, tailored to look & behave like a traditional Puppy. These have a core of enthusiastic adherents, too.
Debian/Ubuntu 'Dogs'
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And of course, there's
FatDog. Need I say more?
This is built using Linux from Scratch, developed from the ground up by its small team of enthusiastic supporters, and is the one Puppy-derived distro that is more like a traditional 'full-installed' OS in terms of how it works. Many people in the wider Linux community use this, even if they don't admit to it!
It has its own sub-forum on the main Puppy Forum:-
FatDog64 @ the Puppy Forums
.....and its own page at Ibiblio:-
FatDog64 at Ibiblio
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There's way more to Puppy than meets the eye. Many dismiss it out of hand as a 'toy' distro, which anyone who's serious about doing stuff wouldn't even bother with.
This is so far off the mark it's a joke. Puppy is technically a "hobbyist" distro, that gives you way more control over your OS than even mainline distros can. We can make our wee canine run - and do - literally
anything. And that's a fact.
It's your decision, of course......but the friendly community will often bend over backwards to assist with technical issues and general problem-solving. What have you got to lose?
(For anybody who may fancy trying their hand at building their own Puppy, this page at Github will explain everything you need to know. Dima is nothing if not thorough when it comes to documentation..!)
Mike.
