I bow my head to the eternal Puppy Linux.
Not that I want to see the end of Microsoft like many do. In fact, I don't care. But it could be in real trouble if the masses suddenly became aware of simple, easy, and efficient software like Puppy -- which makes people's dependence on MS even more inexplicable.
The thing is, not everyone is an engineer so to normies it's not simple. easy or efficient. There's a reason why people like windows.
The major ease of use advantage Windows has is that it is preinstalled on hardware people buy. If you gave a "normie" a computer with desktop Linux distro preinstalled they would find it much easier to use it than to install Windows.
My experience is that most people like Linux provided someone else installs it for them.
Most software is also written for Windows and won't be flawless in WINE
Most people use their computers just to browse the internet and maybe run a few electron applications.
That is a different issue from ease of use, and depends on what software you want to use. There is certainly a lot of software that is available for Linux.
I am far from sure how you would measure "most". Number of executables, number of GUI apps...?. These days there are probably more GUI apps for mobile platforms than for desktops in any case.
A lot of the most commonly used software (e.g. web browsers) is cross platform.
Of course there is a lot of niche software that is Windows specific, but a lot of that has or will move to web based SaaS (not a good thing in my view, BTW).
Most mainstream apps that normies are already familiar with
Can we take a moment to reminisce about the DSL and Knoppix era of running immutable Linux distros off of business card-shaped CDs?
I burned several Linux boot cds with some games on them and took over an unused computer lab at the community college for a lan party. It lasted until someone came around asking why these computers were running when their system showed them as off. Fortunately they laughed it off when they realized we were just kids.
I do remember Knoppix. In particular, being able to recover my very important data (ok, fine, it was pirated music) from a computer that wouldn't boot anymore.
Good times!
I fondly remember learning that I could run Linux off of a floppy disk. A GUI session took two. You had to format the disks to hold slightly more data.
tomsrtbt maybe?
Getting my first CD burner and having access to a whole CD worth of data at once was such a jump forward, even if half of them became coasters.
One thing not mentioned, although it is sort of implied if you are already familiar, is the ability to run Puppy's latest on absolutely ancient hardware.
>General hardware minimum system requirements are:
* CPU Type = x86, x86_64, AMD64
* 32bit Puppy's - CPU = single core Pentium 4 or equiv, RAM = 512mb
* 64bit Puppy's - CPU = 64 bit dual core, RAM = 1gb
No one should be running a Pentium 4 these days unless they get electricity for free somehow. What a horrible CPU design.
Presumably it would also run on a Pentium M :).
The Pentium M was based on the Pentium III though.
(and closer to the first 'Core' (non-Duo/non-Quad), since the evolution went P3>PM>Core and P4 was mostly tossed away apart from a few years of Celerons)
Puppy linux was my first linux install back when I was around 13 years old, and I remember it fondly. I recall I even found it easier to get up and running than ubuntu. (Which is somewhat puzzling in hindsight?)
It was my first linux too, also at 13. I still have the boot CD I burned, framed on my wall.
In my experience Ubuntu is one of the harder distros to get working when it doesn't work ootb.
Agreed. This is exactly why I built Shell Bling Ubuntu https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu , and test it every 6 months or so against a fresh install of Ubuntu in a VM - I don't want to have to remember all the little trivia I have to use to get all of my little command line tools, neovim setup, etc. working together harmoniously. The best part is I can hand it off to my colleagues and blow their minds with just how nice a terminal experience can be, "out of the box", kinda.
And old version of Bionic Puppy I had lying around on a USB saved my butt on Friday when the Azure admin nuked my computer out of existence for not having a serial number.
Puppy Linux made me think of the first distribution I used on a 486dx4-100: Peanut Linux !