Two interesting Linux distros

Tails

Tails or The Amnesic Incognito Live System is a security-focused Linux distro based on Debian. The main aim of Tails is the preservation of anonymity and privacy, being sponsored by the Tor Project. This is also the reason why it exclusively uses TOR to connect to the Internet. Tails has also been funded by the Open Technology Fund, Mozilla, and the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

It is designed to be booted off of a bootable USB or DVD drive, and will not leave any sign of its use on the machine unless the user wants to and decides to do so. Tails comes with the GNOME 3 desktop environment pre-installed, along with the bare minimum software to enable viewing/editing/printing documents/images and playing video files.

The word "Amnesic" in its name means that it runs purely in the computer's RAM and does not write to any persistent type of storage by default. The user can choose to do so, in which case the storage will be automatically encrypted (although it will be detectable). On shutdown, Tails also overwrites most of the RAM it used to prevent/avoid cold boot attacks.

It was released first in June 2009, being a successor to Incognito, which is a now-discontinued Gentoo-based Linux distro. Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald, and Barton Gellman have credited Tails as an important tool used in their work with the (in?)famous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Puppy

The Puppy OS is somewhat akin to Tails in the sense both are quite lightweight, however, Puppy takes it to the next level. It only takes up about 300 MB of RAM for the 32-bit version, or 600 MB for the 64 bit one. It can also run on less than that, needing 128MB minimum to run from RAM and down to 48MB if some of the OS is run from persistent storage. Despite its small size, it includes some fairly basic software like AbiWord, Gnumeric and MPlayer.

The tool Woof can also be used to build a Puppy distribution from the binary packages of other Linux distributions. The supported distributions for this are Debian, Slackware and Ubuntu.

Puppy is generally well-liked thanks to its lightweight nature, being able to revive systems considered obsolete by any modern standard, making them usable for some light common desktop workloads.

The first release of Puppy was in June 2003, however, this was version 0.1, which, as suggested by the version number, was very barebones and lacked a lot of features such as a package manager or any ability to install applications. The full release, version 1.0 came out nearly 2 years later in March 2005. The latest release as of 25.04.2022 is version 9.5, which dropped support for 32-bit systems altogether as Ubuntu did so as well.

Conclusion

Tails and Puppy are two Linux distros that were made for completely different things – one for security, the other for its extremely light weight. They do share some similarities though despite their completely different use cases.