While I'm waiting for the second iso image to burn to CD so that I can try out Linux Mint, I thought I'd give an update that hopefully isn't too long or confusing on my experiences with Puppy Linux which I've been playing with a couple days.
Overall, I spent about a day browsing and seeing what's out there these days in terms of Linux. Then I wrote up a list with the ones I was most interested in at the top. Ubuntu and its brothers such as Kubuntu and Xubuntu (known all together as *buntu) still didn't appeal to me, even in their "light" netbook versions. I especially looked in Lubuntu but it's at the bottom of the list and probably will never be tested. I desire a strange mix of intuitive (read: brain-dead and GUI) but a very light (not many programs) and easily molded OS.
Puppy looked very promising. I played with the live CD and really liked the feature of easily saving changes and whatever documents you create while in a live CD session. Yet I still struggled to stick with it for two days, browsing the forums and tutorials trying to understand and get Puppy working as a full install on my computer. Full just means treating it like almost any other Linux OS that you install on your hard drive. I have absolutely no need to keep it at frugal (install within ram) or as a live CD. Now, I realize that should have been a big clue that Puppy wasn't designed with people like me in mind.
There are so many negatives. Let me point out the positives first: 1) I really like how fast abiword (word processor) starts up. I have such a high intolerance for slow word processors. 2) Most of the getting things functioning went smoothly although took longer than I'm used to, even when under Crunchbang. 3) Setting up the printer was less painful than it was in Crunchbang since there was more guidance. Keep in mind I also knew what I was doing since this is the second time I've set up printing with this printer. 4) I've discovered I really like Opera.
I'm not gonna number the negatives, since there's so many and some will be left out. The one that ultimately made me decide Puppy wasn't gonna cut it was when I tried to connect my external hard drive. Which has all my files and everything backed up from eons ago. I ended up having to plug it in the Colin's mac (this was after he went to bed), copying what I needed to my USB thumb drive, and then mounting the thumb drive. This is so not cool. I found another guy who wanted to mount the same type of external hard drive (Maxtor) and he was at a loss too, despite the suggestions. The tips didn't help me at all either.
Each of the different ways to boot Puppy present a slightly different situation. Getting on wifi was pretty reliable. The one difficulty was that Puppy didn't recognize that some places required a redirect page to say "Yes, I'll behave" like at libraries. So I had to keep reconnecting to the library wifi yesterday but eventually it stuck.
The touchpad was causing a headache before I did a full install. I understood that click and scroll are off by default - no problems there, just turn them on. But then things went crazy. I tried to adjust things like the touchpad sensitivity and kept having to reboot the live CD. Eventually I discovered that if you do happen to slide the sensitivity bar all the way to 0, just slide it back to somewhere else and click save would (usually) solve the problem. Just as a precaution, I've left the side scrolling option unchecked because that seemed to start making things screwy. Having the mouse go to the upper right corner every single time you lift your finger off the touchpad is very uncool.
Many packages, or the files that contains programs, are "pets" (awww, how cute) which have been set up specifically to be installed in Puppy. Okay, got that. But then almost any actual package you want to install needs to be found through Puppy's package manager. This is the worst package manager I've used. It forces you to slowly do exactly one thing at a time (it even makes it almost impossible to use other programs while waiting!). And while it catches most dependencies, there are two major ones that it keeps insisting are required. But they don't exist! I don't mean "aren't in any of the five repositories I have and repeatedly updated to be sure" - I mean the internets tell me they don't. I even tried to determine if they were parts of another package and downloaded those, hoping they would fill up the holes (nope). Not to mention the long list that I was specifically told to write down and install later at the end of the full install - most of those can't be found either.
That said, I only tried to install two programs via the package manager. The first was Pidgin, an IM client. If there's any computer program I can't do without, Pidgin is it. The second was just a notifier program which pops up little messages in the corner letting you know things like "hey, download's done!" or "Colin just said something." Apparently the second works just fine. I can't really test it out because Pidgin refuses to load. Why? Because it requires one of those two packages that don't exist.
Verdict: Puppy Linux does well at what it does well at: working with very old computers and rescuing files from Windows computers that are otherwise dead and irretrievable. Even then, DSL would probably be my choice. Much leaner and snappier (true, I haven't used it since the beginnings of my Linux days over 5 years ago, but I swear it saved my life, or at least that academic quarter). Ye be warned, though - as the main OS of a netbook, it really does suck. And I usually root for the underdog.
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