Until two weeks ago, my only practical knowledge of GNU/Linux other than Android was limited to just a few virtual machine trials of some of the big name distros like Ubuntu, Mint, CentOS, and a few others. Actually, they are great and have many advantages over my long time current platform Windows, but I really didn’t have much enthusiasm or a compelling reason to leave my Windows comfort zone and start learning a completely different OS.
Well, that was until I met Puppy, and I’m so glad I did. At first, because of the name, logo and size, I erroneously imagined it would be a funny distro suitable for my children
so out of curiosity I gave it a try. I started with Xenialpup, and oh boy! Was I in for a surprise? Frankly speaking, it’s not very impressive at first sight because of appearance. The desktop is cluttered with many unnecessary icons, the start menu sub-items are not well organized, and many have somehow annoying very long and even difficult to read names. I really think some serious makeover is needed here.But shortly after, as I was going through the initial guided setup, I started falling in love with it. Not only it was setting up, but also explaining important things to the newcomer in a simple language. The speed and responsiveness are immediately noticeable as well as the abundance of apps and tools, which in spite of Puppy’s incredibly small size gives a reasonable quality out of the box experience.
Quickpet was of great help too, and there was always plenty of helpful tips and explanations particularly in critical areas in System and Setup. The auto-started step by step save-file procedure at shutdown was second to none. It’s so well explained, it made me realize that Puppy is actually teaching me the most important things a GNU/Linux user needs to know in a simple practical manner. It actually made me go back and restart Puppy and start installing additional software and making changes to my liking.
I became hooked, and spent all my free time during the past two weeks on Puppy. I have a bunch of old 500MB and smaller USB sticks and SD cards just lying in the bottom of my drawer, and all of a sudden they became useful again. Puppy is just perfect! There is a Pup suitable for each one of them, Tahrpup, Slacko, Xenialpup, Bionicpup, and even Slacko 5.3.3, the highest Puppy version that could fit on an ancient 120MB SD card
I think Puppy is the perfect place not only for GNU/Linux starters, but also for experienced users. It’s simple enough for the beginner yet packed with powerful tools and features for the advanced user. Although this is my first GNU/Linux experience, I was able to do all the various installations and setup without having to ask any questions. Naturally, there were some issues but I could always find all the help I needed on the website and wiki, in Puppy itself and in the forum.
I have really enjoyed the ride, and learnt quite a lot in the process, and for that I’m very grateful to Puppy’s developers, community members who provided help topics and answers to the various questions in the forum, and to those who asked them. I can’t possibly list all the names, but among others, I was particularly helped by posts and works of Mike Walsh and OscarTalks.
Thank you so much everybody for all your great work. You guys are awesome!
