What is Puppy Linux?

This question is being raised again and again on the Puppy Forum, with lengthy and divergent viewpoints. The basic problem is that several developers are hosting "Puppy like" creations on the forum, that are supposedly all under the Puppy Linux family umbrella. But they are all so different; there is no longer an identifiable "standard" Puppy Linux, that they may, for example, want to announce on Distrowatch.

These lengthy discussions go on, page after page of posts. The most recent is here (currently up to page 14):

https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewtopic.php?t=15758

Not sure how to comment on this observation from reading the forum posts, but anyway... I understand the need to look ahead, but some posters repeatedly criticize what has gone before, like, again and again. There have been criticisms of the old Woof build system as poorly coded, etc.

Anyway, let me explain about Woof. The very first Puppy build system was "Puppy Unleashed", and FatDog, a distribution that you will find on the forum, forked off that (circa 2008).

Woof V1 was created after Puppy Unleashed and later on Woof V2, then about 2012 it forked to Woof-CE, to be run by the "Puppy community". At the same time, I forked Woof2 to woofQ, for building my Quirky Linux. Also in 2012, 2013, I retired from the leadership roll of Puppy, and was no longer the "benevolent dictator" that some named me as.

In the days of Puppy Unleashed, and early Woof1, I was still mostly a Windows person, learning Linux and learning shell scripting. My early scripting skills were mediocre, but it didn't stop me from implementing the concepts that became Puppy. In those days, there were a lot of helpers who contributed code. Which is great, but Woof did become a bit of a "dogs breakfast"; still pretty good though.

Woof-CE was placed on github.com, and for a few years there was one guy working on it, hardly anyone else. The problem was, he made lots of changes without asking, which upset people; he eventually left. I read some of those changes, which made me cringe, but I didn't interfere, as I consider there is nothing worse than the old retired leader coming back in. Today, there are a couple of people working on Woof-CE, also it has been forked and significantly reworked.

For myself, I kept on developing woofQ, then in 2025 I completely overhauled it and created woofQ2 and that was the start of EasyOS 7.x.

The motivation behind this blog post, is I got into a pensive mood after learning that Roger, radky on the forum, had left. Roger has years of great contributions, and this year was working on TrixiePup, with the intention, I think, that this could be the next Puppy. There was some criticism about the direction he was taking, such as his "legacy" TrixiePup dropping ROX-Filer; he got fed up, and suddenly dropped out.

So, it comes down to the fragmentation of Puppy Linux, and all the disparate opinions. The question is, just what is "Puppy Linux"? What is it that set Puppy apart in the early days and made it very popular? And how many of those features should be there in the future, and what new features should be adopted?

The important words in the above paragraph are "What is it that set Puppy apart". Because yes, Puppy was different, and ticked the boxes for many people. Trying to map a path forward, the biggest risk is that Puppy will lose the uniqueness and become just another Linux distribution, lost in a sea of lookalikes.

The traditional Puppy

Just thinking off the top of my head, and I might not think of all of them, but here goes, this is what made the classical Puppy stand out:

• JWM and ROX-Filer desktop, with partition icons on the desktop
• The aufs layered filesystem, with underlying "sfs" squashfs file(s)
• Runs fast in RAM with optional save (preserves life of Flash memory)
  
• A complete development environment in just one "devx" sfs
• Frugal installation, with a savefile or save-folder
• Lots of unique GUI apps created by those who love Puppy
• That includes a lot of ROXapps, that integrate with ROX-Filer
• Tools that made Puppy great for recovering broken Windows systems
• Large number of applications in a very small size
• Superb on a bootable USB-stick
• Tools for shell scripts, in particular gtkdialog, to create GUI apps
• Simple busybox-based init, with pup_event service management
• Puppy Package Manager (PPM)
• PET packages
  
• Very small initrd (initramfs) with statically-linked binaries
• Logged in as the "root" user, with option to run apps as "spot"
  
• A great community forum, with lots of help
  

Today, the situation has changed...

The next Puppy

Roger's legacy TrixiePup did away with ROX-Filer, replaced with SpaceFM. The reason is that ROX is built with gtk2, which is considered to be deprecated, and X11 which is also considered to be deprecated in favour of Wayland.

This is mainly what the squabble is about; the deprecation of gtk2, and eventually, gtk3, and X11. The aufs development is showing signs of faltering; besides, overlayfs is mainstreamed in the  Linux kernel, aufs isn't. So we likely have to treat aufs as deprecated also.

So, looking at some proposals for the next-generation "Puppy", for example "Vanilla Dpup" and some others, we need to cutdown the above list:

• The overlay layered filesystem, with underlying "sfs" squashfs file(s)
• Runs fast in RAM with optional save (preserves life of Flash memory)
  
• Frugal installation, with a savefile or save-folder
• Tools that made Puppy great for recovering broken Windows systems
• Superb on a bootable USB-stick

...I have even taken out the "great forum", as it has become so fragmented. But, if the forum members get behind this next-generation Puppy, then it can become great again.

Of course, a complete redesign like Vanilla Dpup brings new features, some of them arguably unique and not in other distros. Because that's the key point isn't it, that the future pup be clearly distinguishable from the many hundreds of other distros out there.

EasyOS is a traditional Puppy

I would like to mention that EasyOS has retained all of the features of the traditional Puppy listed above, and added major new ones that make Easy even more unique:

• pup_event has gone to the next-level, with sophisticated service management
• Easy Containers, super-simple container mechanism
• One-click "devx" container, to completely separate development from the main desktop
• Lockdown mode to run in RAM with all internal drives disabled
• EasyShare simple network management
• One-click version update, snapshots, simple rollback and roll-forward
• Hardware profiling for booting a USB-stick on different computers
• Run each app as its own user, for enhanced security
  
• Four packages managers; PKGget, SFSget, Flapi and Appi

...what this means is that Easy has become more and more distinguishable from all other Linux distributions, clearly delineating itself.

One change though, Easy 7.x has dropped aufs, replaced by overlay; otherwise, all the features listed for the traditional Puppy are still there. Frugal install only offers a save-folder; though, in theory there could be a save-file supported.

For Puppy people, clarifying one point; the Puppy PPM is still there, evolved into the much more powerful PKGget. This is a chameleon, a GUI frontend for Debian's APT and still able to install PET packages, as well as other types such as RPM and .tar.xz -- and yes, 'apt' can be run in a terminal and automatically syncs with PKGget.

Yeah, sure gtk2 and X11 are deprecated, but how long will the death take? If Debian drops gtk2 five years from now, they are still likely to keep X11 (my opinion!), which means that I will compile gtk2 myself, so that ROX-Filer can live on (if I'm still around in 5 years).

But yes, long-term, many "traditional Puppy" features will have to die, including ROX. Probably.   

Tags: easy