I've always been a big believer in the original Puppy concept of keeping old, low powered machines running. I'm just a general user who uses Puppies on a little netbook I have, which is pretty under powered so it needs something lightweight. I've been comparing various Puppies (and couple of other distros) and can't help noticing the way things have gone. With each subsequent Puppy release the ISO's get bigger, and system requirements increase. We get up to Fossapup and we need minimum 1Gb RAM, (preferably 2Gb to be comfortable), and it's 64 bit only. So nobody's going to be running Fossa on a very old machine.
But why is this? Let's face it, it doesn't take any more resources to view a JPG image or play an MP3 file now than it did 20 years ago. Have things grown the way they have purely down to accommodating increasingly bloated Browsers and Web sites? I must admit my computing needs are fairly simple these days, and less than what they were a few years ago, so I could well be missing something. There may be some functionality catered for which I never use. Having said that, what does Fossa do that (for example) Tahr doesn't? Anything?
Among my comparisons I've been giving Antix a spin, and for the things I've tried with it required resources are very low. It does have some quirks compared to "mainline" distros, some of which I haven't quite got my head around yet. The other thing in it's favour is that it doesn't appear to be an issue installing any of my preferred software, but that's another subject entirely. I will be sticking with Bionic32 for now, as although the machine is 64 bit it uses noticeably less resources than Bionic64.
Interested to hear anyone else's viewpoints or comments.