Review: Porteus 5.01
In a lot of ways, Porteus was a breath of fresh air this week. The distribution strives to provide an easy to use, Slackware based, live desktop experience. It does this and does it with a very minimal (under 400MB) ISO file. I think this is impressive and I like how fast, how stable, and how clean the Porteus desktop experience is. For someone who wants to listen to music, perform some basic system recovery, or take their operating system with them on a thumb drive with the option to save files on persistent media, Porteus is a good option.
There were some problems in key areas though. Porteus was unable to work in UEFI mode, in both VirtualBox and on my laptop, limiting the experience to machines with Legacy BIOS mode enabled. Installing new web browsers worked, but the process of transitioning from the packages being downloaded to being installed was not obvious. Likewise, the slapt-get package manager did not work to fetch new software. One of the key points in the project's release announcement was the package handling options, and having what was probably the most commonly used option not work was a disappointment.
Problems with package management aside, I quite liked Porteus. It's light, fast, stable, and clean. There are some unusual design choices at play, some nice custom tools (like the Porteus Settings Centre). I wouldn't use this distribution as a daily driver, but I do think it is an attractive option for testing or rescuing older equipment, especially computers running old i586 processors.