Puppy Linux is lightweight and minimal - but expandable.
It was designed originally for older less capable machines so was trimmed to a minimum.

Hi.

https://cdimage.debian.org/cdimage/u...weekly-builds/

Have fun!

Thank you all so much for your advice! It seems linuxquestions is a warm, friendly and helpful place.

Ill be on to trying lxle, lubuntu and puppy.

I also read about elementaryos which was not suggested here. Could this work too or is this the wrong one?

Thank you all so much for your advice! It seems linuxquestions is a warm, friendly and helpful place.

Ill be on to trying lxle, lubuntu and puppy.

I also read about elementaryos which was not suggested here. Could this work too or is this the wrong one?

I like elementaryOS very much, but it is not as light as Puppy or TinyCore. It is, at its core, an Ubuntu spinoff and a little heavier (at my last check) than the lubuntu spinoff. The selections made for it are excellent for a beginner (it is what I used to start my son on linux) and may serve you well. It does include packages that you may not need, but so might any of the others.

Puppy and TinyCore are designed to run in live USB/CD mode. They can be installed to disk, in what they refer to as a frugal mode. The others install quite easily.
You might want access to a how-to install document for reference when you install if you are not familiar with things like disk partitioning. Letting it install with the defaults for everything is recommended as long as those defaults are appropriate for your hardware, language, and location.

Problems I have encountered are:
1. Failure to autodetect the proper WIFI drivers for certain BROADCOM chipsets. This has gotten much better recently, despite the broadcom people seeming to reject all requests and suggestions from the Linux world. I believe that we can thank the Red Hat people for any progress, they bring some serious development power as well as corporate and market clout to that table. The work-around is to connect using the wired Ethernet and install the correct driver set. This is somewhat manual, but easy (a simple command).

2. Modems. I hope no one is still using modems, but there are certain Microsoft Only chipsets that require a kludge to get working under Linux. This was also once true of some Ethernet NIC devices! I do not believe that any hardware released in the last 8 years will have that problem, and it was never very common.

3. Mis-detection of the video or monitor. I have had a laptop install detect the built-in NVIDIA circuit as a high-end graphic card (it was most emphatically NOT) and load the correct driver with the wrong settings. This left me with no (usable) xwindows display, but forcing a re-detect at the command line fixed it. I have seen postings indicating that this kind of issue has been experienced by others, but has gotten very rare.

I do not expect you to run into any of these issues, but if you do someone here will have a fix or work-around that we can help you with.

I will add that one of the features of Puppy in "frugal mode" is that it can use the same partition for its install as an existing OS - in fact that is the best way to use it as all the advanced features either ONLY or WORK BEST in frugal mode. Don't be put off by the word "Frugal" as it describes the effort to install and run it and its impact, NOT the features.
There are several versions of Puppy that are based on binaries from different major Linux distributers and will usually run the utilities from that distribution.

i wouldn't call elementary lightweight.
also i've grown suspicious of it, judging from some other threads about it i read.
also, it could be considered still beta, judging from the 0.x version numbers.

I ran into some issues getting elementary to update. Installed what i need, and came to 4.5 gb installed. I like it very much. the only thing i am missing is some lightweight spreadsheet not requiring many dependencies and able to read/write to some basic excel compatible format. no need for anything fancy, simple will do great. Any suggestions?

Lubuntu I couldnt get the screen backlight to dim and the keyboard backllight keys do not work properly, so i dumped lubuntu.

Manjaro xfce is great, no issues other then ... i dont like the graphics much. a matter of taste. it comes in at 4.9 gb with the stuff i need. In an ideal world i would replace libre office with some simple spreadsheet app and find a more beautiful gui, like elementary has. Can this be done in manjaro xfce?

Puppy I liked very much, like 10 years or so ago. I was excited to try it again, but somehow i dont get it to boot the uefi usb versions properly. It always errors on booting the window manager. So out it goes for now.

I'll 2d this

Here is where to get MINT

linuxmint download

support forums linuxmint

i've used Ubuntu, Mint/Cinnamon, Mint/KDE, Mint/LMDE2/Cinamon, and straight Debian

I'd 2d the idea to start out: select Mint 18 / Cinnamon

Why build a distro from Debian like mint or buntu &c? https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...8/#post5707533

I did a download and install from a straight Debian Dist. it worked fine although I do need to work with it a bit more.

It is my understanding that the straight Debian install will include only FOSS software: if any "non free" modules are needed the user will have to acquire these on his own.

so i think a good reason to go with (e.g.) MINT.18 is that it will be ready to use out of the box, err right off the install stick.

I recommend installing / and /home in separate partitions so that -- if you have to re-install the o/s at some point you can keep your /home partition.

You could add the "NoScript" addon to firefox. Then you have to give explicit permission for any site to run scripts. You can allow certain scripts on a site but others forbid on the same site. But I would say the best security an ordinary home user might need is a Watchguard router connected to a pay vpn service.

You can pick up cheap Watchguards on eBay. They're commercial firewall appliances that are quite difficult to penetrate. Versus, say, the Smoothwall Firewall free distribution which can be silently penetrated instantaneously!

You would be amazed at how many Linux users have hypervisors on their machines that run a hidden process for each legitimate process. If in doubt, run:Since I've been using a vpn I haven't gotten a hypervisor trojan.

Since I started using a hypervisor, I have not gotten ANY trojan. I suppose it depends on how you use things.
On my network I run a honeypot, with intrusion detection and threat blocking at the address block level. Many of my processes (running a browser, email client, feed reader) run in a container that gets totally trashed on exit.

Oh, and I love using KolibriOS, either native or as a virtual guest, which has no known exploits. Yet.

#1 that is one reason I stay familiar with simple, minimalist distributions. They are great candidates for both hypervisor bases and container OS.

#2 I would never recommend a system with my kind of security to a new user. It is complex and requires regular log monitoring. I am not sure new users should be expected to enjoy that.

I just get a kick out of ruining the bad guys day. Often without him knowing what happened. ;-)

There are some available like Calligra sheets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compar...sheet_software

Manjaro has a lot of desktop environments other than xfce:
"Desktop: Budgie, Cinnamon, Deepin, GNOME, i3, KDE Plasma, LXDE, LXQt, Xfce"
http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=manjaro

You can get pretty much any desktop environment onto any distribution.

Am I the only one here who sees any problem at all with recommending to a newbie asking for "simple" a rolling release distro that is based on another rolling release distro? It seems to me high stability ought to at least be mentioned as a possible component of "simple", if not asserted as an elementary component.