Top Lightweight Linux Distributions To Try In 2017

Puppy Linux has been a superior recovery system for a long time. I have always been able to recover systems that have not been hopelessly damaged. The distros best feature is stability. Some of these others - not so much.

@BFM

> The distros best feature is stability. Some of these others - not so much.

There's certainly MUCH good to say about Puppy! OTOH, this particular author has LinuxAndUbuntu in his or her very websitename,so it seems to me fairly OBVIOUS the author goes out of his or her way to favor thelightweight Baboontooz-derived ones.

There are a number of other great, stable, Debian-derived lightweight distros NOT based on Baboontu that he or she coulda considered as well. I'm thinking in particular of the lightest-weight Debian and Debian Live versions, Knoppix with its cheatcodes, and Grml.

My own 2c

For something based on Debian Stable, I've read great reviews of MX-16. It's just ugly out-of-the box. But, that can be remedied.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/mx-16.html

Right now I have a Thinkpad from 2003, which I maxed out the RAM to 1 GB on when I saw it selling cheap (it had 256 MB). On that I have Salix OS Fluxbox, and it does OK with it. Of course, I don't really have any reason to use that computer, so sometimes it just sits there for quite a while.

I also have a couple of old Eee PC netbooks from around 2008 with their original 1 GB on which I run Debian stable with LXDE. I could switch them to a lighter desktop if I wanted to of course. They work reasonably well as they are.

The funny part about running Linux on this old hardware is that I can get a surprising amount of performance out of it, but you kind of have to know what you are doing to run it that way. That is, you do things in an unconventional way to get adequate performance. You do things like streaming Youtube videos to a media player using SMTube or selectively allowing Javascript in your browser.

Of course, when you can get Core 2 Duo hardware for a song, and that doesn't really require any workarounds (though I recommend 1.5 GB or more RAM), I guess I can see why people aren't interested in running some of the lower powered hardware.

I've been using the Trinity Recovery Kit as my go to recovery distro for a number of years now: http://trinityhome.org/

For folks who prefer something more mainstream with better support, I'd recommend System Rescue CD: https://www.system-rescue-cd.org/

I really like Q4OS as a lightweight distribution but AntiX is good as well.

> I really like Q4OS as a lightweight distribution but AntiX is good as well.

I forgot about Q4OS. + Good suggestion.

> I really like Q4OS as a lightweight distribution but AntiX is good as well.

Well, there's a difference between a lightweight distribution and a recovery system. Most lightweight distributions probably don't include things like ddrescue, for instance.