Add to Chrome
Add to Edge
Add to Firefox
Add to Opera
Add to Brave
Add to SafariWhen comparing Peppermint Linux OS vs Puppy Linux, the Slant community recommends Puppy Linux for most people. In the question“What are the best Linux distributions for desktops?” Puppy Linux is ranked 10th while Peppermint Linux OS is ranked 31st. The most important reason people chose Puppy Linux is:
Puppy Linux requires 128MB of RAM and 333Mhz of CPU, although 256MB of RAM is recommended.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Looks great
The XFCE Whisker menus and dark theme are well designed.
Easy to move the panel to the top and add plank on the bottom.
Pro Friendly and helpful forum
Pro Fast and light on resources
RAM consumption is the same as LxLE, but more efficient and because of Whisker Menu and other tweaks that let us feel more like we have a XFCE desktop environment, as keyboard shortcuts, for instance, it looks like we got here the fastest and lightest, globally speaking. Very good on performance. Download Respin 7 (March 2017), install Libreoffice and then compare, for example, opening Libreoffice Writer inside Peppermint 7, Extix 17.04, Lubuntu 16.10, Xubuntu 16.04, Backbox 4.7, Linux Mint 18.1 Xfce an Mate or Linux Lite 3.4 (and others). Finally, you'll find out that after opening a few apps in Peppermint it remains smooth and light. Nemo file explorer on Peppermint is incredibly faster than on Mint Cinnamon; lx terminal is very fast when opening; updating is fast. And after all this, distro keeps working and working very solidly and consistently along the time. And yet the look and feel of the environment is pleasant.
Pro Comes with a variety of helpful tools
Works great with Teamviewer, Synaptic, XNview, KODI, and Pdf-Xchange editor (via playonlinux). Netflix works awesome with Chrome browser. The ICE SSB tool is great for creating web apps that run as if you installed them locally.
The Software Boutique (packaged with The MATE Welcome software Center) recognizes all software and installs it with one click.
Pro It works well "Out Of The Box"
There are enough useful back end packages installed by default to make the system useable for normal use right after the installation of the base distro.
Pro Peppermint 7 is stable
Peppermint 7OS (32 and 64 bit) has been updated to the Respin PPA . Kernel updated to 4.9.24 on 23-April -2017 with no issues and all software still runs great.
Pro Peppermint 10 is Stable
Pro Peppermint9 is stable
Peppermint 9OS (32 and 64 bit) has been updated to the Respin PPA.
Pro Extremely low minimum system requirements
Puppy Linux requires 128MB of RAM and 333Mhz of CPU, although 256MB of RAM is recommended.
Pro The whole OS runs off of RAM
Since Puppy Linux is completely loaded and run off of RAM instead of HDD, it's read/write speed is not a factor.
Pro Designed to run as a live USB/CD
A portable version, that can be carried on a thumb drive without requiring installation, weighs less than 100MB; a Live CD - less than 150MB. You can even save your settings and files for Puppy on the external device/media.
Running off a live CD also has security benefits, as your system will reset to the known config after each boot.
Pro Different distro based versions available
Puppy Linux offers a few different releases.
The first is an Ubuntu based release called Tahrpup, by using this version the user is able to take advantage of all software and support from Ubuntu.
The second version is called Slacko, which is built upon the Slackware binaries.
The third is called Wary and it is built to support older hardware than the rest.
And the fourth is called Quirky, which is used as a base to explore new ideas.
Pro Linux distro designed for this exact purpose
Pro Offers a long term support release
Puppy Linux offers an LTS release called Precise.
Pro It can be the only distro that works
Sometimes, Puppy Linux is the only distro that works on an old machine: all other distros are more demanding.
Pro JWM used as window manager
JWM is a low resource window manager that is used in most Puppy Linux installs.
Cons
Con Since it is based on Lubuntu, the double click speed needs to be slowed down
It's false that Peppermint 7 is tout court based on Lubuntu. Take a look at this: "Peppermint Seven makes use of the Xfwm4 window manager and Xfce bottom panel in the LXDE desktop environment. This is unlike other Linux distributions that use LXDE as the default desktop environment where it is common to use the Openbox window manager and lxpanel." And more: "Peppermint Seven is built on the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS code base and makes use of its package repositories." Contrarily to other Linux distributions, Peppermint creators never said Peppermint 7 is based on Lubuntu, like LXLE. Using LXDE and being based on Ubuntu is very different from being simply based on Lubuntu. In fact, Lubuntu is not faster than Peppermint and has loads of lacks for a nowadays OS experience.
Con A bit ugly
Using puppy makes you feel like you just jumped 20 years into the past. Being that the purpose of Puppy Linux is to run or really low resource machines the software used is often on the older side, which is precisely why it has a 20 year old look.
Con Not as light as it used to be
It's light, but not as light as it was 1-2 years ago.
Con Smallest software library ever
You can barely find any precompiled packages for Puppy.
Con No built in compositing
Being a low resource distro there is zero built in compositing for the JWM window manager. Though one can be added through a bit of work.
