I'm probably the only one here who uses Puppy Linux , but have done for 3 years. And I use it for work as well as -- well everything. My wife, who is a contract book and magazine copy editor, also uses it for work.
It takes some learning to begin with, and sometimes I have to use creative means to get new hardware to work with it (since hardware drivers are almost always written to be compatible with Windows or Mac OS), but I've never failed so far to get what I needed. The Puppy Linux forum always comes to the rescue when there's a new hardware problem.
Why do I use a relatively unknown OS?
It is spectacular in what it can run on at very high speed -- you can actually run a version of Puppy Linux on a 486 computer and surf the web. On the other hand It will run on the newest hardware.
It is tiny. The whole OS is about 100 megabytes in size. It will easily fit on any media, CD, thumb drive, whatever, and it can operate beside your regular operating system. Dual booting is easy
If desired you can create a virtual hard drive inside a single large file (called a "frugal" install) on your operating system, and it will happily operate within that file, saving data only within that file (or elsewhere, if desired).
A frugal install is easy to back up because it is a single file. In fact the OS itself can operate off of a CD (it is small enough and fast enough to take a reasonable time to load that way).
If you operate off of a closed CD, viruses can't touch it (you start fresh from the CD every time you boot) -- although it is generally virus resistant anyway.
The reason it is so fast is that the whole operating system, plus included applications (word processor, spreadsheet, graphics editors, utilities, media, etc.) is loaded into RAM memory on start up and operates from there.
If you add other application programs that you like, you can effectively re-write the operating system with those programs included onto a CD, and call it whatever you want an distribute it. Such variations are called "puplets" and may have specialty uses -- I wrote one once that was specialized for video and graphics editing, with many different editors on board. I still pop the CD into the computer every once in awhile to do editing work, without disturbing my regular Puppy Linux OS (or Win7 also on this machine).
I find I might start up Windows 7 once a month for some specialized application that has no equivalent in Linux. But that is becoming rarer and rarer for me.
I do use WINE which is an additional compatibility layer for running many Windows programs under Linux. It won't run everything, but I do frequently use it to run Google "SketchUp", Josh Madison's "Convert", 7-Zip, and a few other utilities.
The disadvantages?
Puppy Linux takes a pretty good learning curve to start with -- it will seem odd to those used to recent versions of Windows, though more familiar to users of Win 98 and 2000 in structure. And it's sometimes tough to get new hardware up and running, particularly if Linux drivers haven't yet been written by the Linux volunteer community to suit. But for older hardware it will convert an old windows clunker into a modern high speed machine. Anything over 300 megabytes in memory and a Pentium II will feel like it is suddenly supercharged. Well actually newer hardware will also react the same way.
One other area of confusion is that there are now many different Puppy Linuxes -- that is actually encouraged rather than discouraged. The main line Puppies are written by Barry Kauler, the originator.
I run a Kauler version of puppy caller Racy on a newer low end dual processor laptop. Older computers might better run Kauler's Wary, or Puppy linux 4.3.2.
For very old computers, there is a well-updated classic version called Puppy 2.15.
And then of course there are a million specialized puplets. I tend to stay away from those as the authors often seem to tire of providing free one-man support after a few years of questions and challenges from users. Either that or they get hired by industry as software developers!
For me, I think the greatest attraction of Puppy Linux is that I am fully in control of the OS. It doesn't control me. It's like a machine tool that way. It can start out basic and simple, and be extended in any direction I wish. Of course that takes some study and learning about how it works, but I like that sort of thing.
