Puppy Linux vs Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Puppy Linux requires 128MB of RAM and 333Mhz of CPU, although 256MB of RAM is recommended.

Since Puppy Linux is completely loaded and run off of RAM instead of HDD, it's read/write speed is not a factor.

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.

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.

Puppy Linux offers an LTS release called Precise.

Sometimes, Puppy Linux is the only distro that works on an old machine: all other distros are more demanding.

JWM is a low resource window manager that is used in most Puppy Linux installs.

Each released version of RHEL is supported for around ten years by Red Hat with constant bug fixes and security updates.

RHEL favours stability over being up-to date. For this reason it ships with packages that may be up to two years behind in order to ensure stability over everything else.

Using older versions for packages means that they have been thoroughly tested and used in production for quite some time, and are ensured to play well with each-other.

This strategy has paid off quite a lot in the past. One example is the Heartbleed bug which left RHEL unaffected since it was using a two-year old OpenSSL library which did not have the bug.

RHEL has several built-in solutions for disaster recovery. For example, it comes with pacemaker which can be configured to manage multi-site and and stretch clusters across multiple geographical locations for disaster recovery and scalability. It can also be configured to trigger notifications when the status of a managed cluster changes by using enhanced pacemaker alerts.

Since RHEL backports all updates and bug fixes to older versions in order to maintain package compatibility across releases, applications hosted on Red Hat Linux don't have to worry about potential breaking changes in libraries they use, especially language libraries.

This distro is by far the one with the largest number of certified server-class hardware.

Comes with built-in management tools for containers (Atomic CLI, Cockpit) and a container runtime in the form of Docker engine.