I want to explain how I came to be using Puppy Linux, and would like to hear other peoples 'Pupographys'!

Having been house trained on an Amstrad WPC, and then force fed different flavours of Windoze for many years I decided to give Linux a try after a recommendation from a relative about 4 years ago!

Knowing absolutely nothing about Linux I naively went to PC world and picked out a boxed copy of Suse 9.2 (£29.99) It came with a live demo CD and after some tinkering I managed to do dual install with Windoze ME. I found it difficult to get used to the new interface, apps and looks, but the only thing that didn't work was my winmodem. It took a few days of very frustrating internet searching to find a solution (because I had to reboot everytime I wanted to try something).

I then bought the new Suse 9.3 (£79.99 <wince>), but I could never get the winmodem to work no matter what I did, and it would not connect to the network or printers at work. So I dumped Linux and went crawling back to my ex!

Several months later I happened to see a copy of Linux Format in a newsagents with a free copy of Mepis on the cover. Within hours I had installed it onto an old PC and it connected to the Internet through the winmodem out of the box! The affair was rekindled.

I then began trying out lots of distros including Knoppix, DSL, Fedora and Mandriva and finally settled on Ubuntu (Edgy Eft) as all of the hardware just worked out of the box and it gave me easy access to lots of extra apps. I pretty much stuck to Ubuntu until they released the Gutsy Gibbon. Disaster! I could simply not get it to work with my ATI video cards (Xorg7.3) and the fact that a simple 3D desktop was enabled by default caused all sorts of problems with my older machines.

This sent me into months of a very distressing distro identity crisis. I tried nearly all of the major distros and just couldn't find one that matched Ubuntu in terms of hardware compatibility and ease of use. No matter which distro I tried there was always some essential function that I could not get to work: Sabayon couldn't print on my work printer, Fedora had no multimedia codecs, Knoppix doesn't work very well as a hard drive installation, Suse had a very limited range of apps available etc etc. I eventually settled for a month or two on PCLinuxOS, the key feature that attracted me to this was the fact that you could remaster it very easily to create a live/installable CD containing all the tools you needed. However, it is primarily a KDE distro, Gnome is available but not as well supported.

I had spent at least six months now jumping from distro to distro. Spending every evening and weekends installing and setting up a new distro on all of my PC's and laptops, and then found something essential didn't work and starting all over again. This became even more serious when my last hope of redemption Hardy Heron didn't work with any of my graphics cards either.

I had spent over six months now running like a headless chicken from one distro to the next and I began to realise that this could potentially continue for months/years. In the meantime I was making no progress with my development projects and it was beginning to have a negative effect on my mental health! I needed to settle on a distro and stick to it!

I had looked at many mini-distos in the past, and although they where useful live tools I had never considered any of the them to be a serious desktop operating system. For example DSL was very fast and reliable, but it had a very limited range of apps and was stuck on the 2.4 series kernel.

Then just by chance on one of my daily visits to Distrowatch I noticed Puppy 4 with a shiny new logo. I had tried Puppy before and although it had a lot more apps than DSL I had never really taken it seriously. I think this is partly because of the tendancy of Linux users and magazines etc to favour the large established distros and see the small independant distros as amusing little toys, and partly because of the way puppy linux looked! No offence to Barry et al, but I really thought that the old colour schemes and TCL/TK gui's looked childish, old fashioned and amateurish (I am very embarrassed to admit this) it was pure aesthetic snobbery!

However Puppy 4 looked very slick with its shiny new GTK looks and it worked right out of the box with all of my PC's and laptops, which I think is a first. None of the major distros have ever worked on all of my machines.

The only weakness from my point of view was the lack of a few essential apps, but these where easy to add, and remastering the CD was childsplay. I also discovered that there were plenty of third party packages available, a very active/helpful online community and that puppy provided a very wide and flexible range of boot options.

You could do a traditional hard drive install, run from the live CD and save your sessions on a hard drive , usb pen or the cd itself! It boots from CD's, USB pens, internal SSD drives, SD cards (via usb) etc. Perhaps the most flexible option is the frugal install which allows you to install it on a computer without touching the original installation.

The most useful option for me is the frugral install, which means I can install lots of different versions of Puppy side by side, experiment with them and if it all goes wrong I can simple boot from another installation and repair it. I am also now starting to explore different puplets and have been most impressed with Muppy and Pupeee (for the eeepc)!.

I hope my days as a lost linux soul are over as I see so much potential in the core Puppy distro, that it seems to be able to meet all of my needs and it is very small and very fast into the bargain. Its size means it is easy to download and very quick to install etc. Is this what Donny Osmond meant by 'Puppy Love'?

I would be very interested to read about how other users came to settle on Puppy Linux and what features they think makes it stand out from the pack?