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Puppy is extraordinarily small, yet quite fully featured. Puppy boots into a 48 - 54M ramdisk, and that's it, the whole caboodle runs in RAM. Unlike live CD distributions that have to keep pulling stuff off the CD, Puppy in his entirety loads into RAM. This means that most applications start in the blink of an eye and respond to user input instantly. Puppy can boot off different media: flash-Puppy (Puppy booting off a flash card or any USB memory device), live-Puppy (Puppy booting off a CDROM), zippy-Puppy (Puppy booting off a Zip disk or LS/120/240 Superdisk), floppy-Puppy (Puppy booting off a set of floppy disks), hard-Puppy (Puppy booting off an internal hard drive).

SaxenOS is a lightweight Slackware and Zenwalk-based distribution with the Xfce desktop. It is designed for older, low-specification computers.

STX Linux is a desktop Linux distribution especially targeted to older hardware. It also works quite well on new PC's. Overview: Complete Linux Desktop. Lightweight (about 1.25 GB installed, 421 MB ISO). Slackware based. Works nicely on old Hardware. Harddisk Installer from Pocketlinux. The desktop looks very much like Windows 98/ME/2000.

VectorLinux is a small, fast, Intel Linux operating system based on one of the original Linux distributions, Slackware. Vectorlinux provides a variety of features for the casual computer user. The power user will be pleased that all the tools are there to compile their own programs. Administrators will be equally as pleased due to the small size and memory requirements of the operating system.

Xubuntu is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. Unlike its parent, however, Xubuntu uses the light-weight XFce desktop environment and is optimised for lower-end machines. The distribution includes only GTK+ applications where possible.