When Barry Kauler first launched Puppy Linux back in 2003, he can’t have imagined just how far his tiny distro would travel over the following 20 years. Renowned for its tiny pawprint – Puppy is a great choice for older and low-powered PCs – the distro is also well known for the dozens of variants that it’s spawned. There are official variants based on various versions of Ubuntu, Raspbian and Slackware, as well as unofficial variants known as puplets, remasters that spin Puppy Linux in all kinds of different directions. And then there’s EasyOS.
In 2013, Barry Kauler stepped down from maintaining Puppy Linux, and handed the Woof2 build system to the community. That subsequently became Woof-CE, which is still used to build Puppy Linux and its derivatives. However, Kauler moved in a different direction, developing woofQ to build his own experimental derivative, Quirky Linux (https://archiveos.org/quirky). In 2017, he launched another experimental distro on the back of woofQ – EasyOS – and it’s this he focuses his efforts on.
Despite its pedigree, Barry Kauler is keen to stress that EasyOS is not Puppy Linux, and while there’s similarities, there’s also a lot going on that’s unique to EasyOS. The result is a lightweight, regularly updated distro that runs beautifully on older hardware and serves as a test bed for concepts that could one day find their way into more mainstream distros, including the ability run any app in its own container. You don’t even need a spare hard drive or partition to run it.
Woof, woof!
EasyOS’s woofQ build system is a collection of scripts that stitches the OS together from).
