Any of you folks used precise puppy? I needed a super-lean distro for an ancient laptop I'm going to be writing on. I played around with the live CD and was amazed at how fast it was. For my purposes, this old, slow win XP laptop is like a new purchase.

My kids play Putt-Putt on this machine when it was XP, but it should work on this distro.

Linux saved the day again!

Low end Linux Live CDs are useful for web browsing and casual games.
If you want to play latest games made for Linux, those Live CDs are not good choice.

Puppy is very handy, true!

But keep in mind that the trick to its speed is that it runs entirely from memory thanks to its tiny size. Its default software selection is also made with this restriction.

You can achieve similar speed with any slightly advanced & customizable full size distro (Arch, Debian testing...) that comes in a lean package, without a standard heavy weight desktop environment, or tons of useless distro-specific tools and technologies. For example: My main Arch box that I use for everything work & games & entertainment also uses about 200MB RAM at idle with the window manager and X loaded. It runs perfectly on my gaming rig, but also my ancient XP laptop.

@Tallima: define ancient, CPU, memory, gfx....

Latest KDE5 uses 600MiB RAM. For 300-600MiB, go with XFCE. For less: you gotta use old XFCE 4.6 or *box'es, those require 80-300. For even less, its probably better to take Freedos...

This is what I tend to do a lot, giving my old ancient PCs a new life with some lean Linux distro. Like I have Linux Mint 17.2 XFCE on this old desktop machine I am writing this on. I have no experience with Precise Puppy, I've decided to stay with a relatively popular distro, just choosing a lighter desktop environment for it (like XFCE).

This currently has 1 GB of RAM, and it would be nice to have more. I feel that outside of gaming, the amount of RAM is usually the most important thing for the performance of the system in the long run, ie. the first thing where you start wishing for more.

Since this desktop does have a 64bit CPU (some early 64bit single-core AMD CPU IIRC), this distro is the 64bit Linux Mint. Maybe I should have installed the 32bit version instead, considering the RAM limitations? I have the 32bit Linux Mint 17.2 on an old Dell laptop which has a 32bit Pentium CPU (it also has 1GB or RAM).

Tiny Core Linux can run with only 48MB of ram, though since that distro runs from RAM by default, you might be limited in what you can install (though you can get it to save extensions to disk if you don't have the RAM).

But doesn't it also depend what you are going to do on it? I have 1GB RAM on my retro-PC running Linux Mint 17.2 XFCE, and it does get unresponsive quite often if I have several tabs open to modern web sites (which I guess can use quite a lot of memory?).

Of course if I merely have the Mint desktop in front of me and a xfce terminal open, there are no performance (memory) issues. :)

A Solid State Drive also makes a big difference in how responsive the system is, especially if you are trying to use it right after rebooting.

Somehow I feel that is probably irrelevant on this old desktop which uses PATA hard drives. :)

I've been thinking of doubling the RAM of this old PC from 1 to 2 GB just so that Mint would run better on it, but I am unsure if any place is selling such old RAM anymore. For playing some old games on the Windows XP on this same PC, I don't need more RAM there.

Anyway as I said, I'm unsure if I should have installed the 32bit Mint on this, instead of the current 64bit (even though this does have an old 64bit CPU). Does the 32bit version need less memory?

There do exist SSDs with a PATA interface. Also, I believe you can use an adapter to use a SATA drive with a PATA interface. (I would suggest getting a cheaper SSD if you are going to go this route, as an expensive one could very well be bottlenecked by the interface.)

Since you have RAM less than 3.5~4.0 GiB, install a 32 bit version will use less memory, and will run faster.
However, normal people may not feel the difference if you only use it for web browsing.

Yes, I meant a base system.

For browsers, the biggest memory hogs are adblockers and ...ads. Every tab uses memory and caching mechanism varies on browser engine. Thats additional variables..

To fit within 1GiB, you need for example: xfce and firefox with ublock origin, and then browser/caching settings. In this setting, the base firefox uses around 200MiB +~20-50MiB per tab; with ~300MiB for xfce(with kernel, pulse, systemd etc). Would be 550-800 MB system.

But you can easily slap 4GB even in pentium 4 - K7 (athlon/duron) era pc for little money.

Grave memory problems only show on old laptops with 2 memory slots and 2GiB max, or even more ancient machines like (super) socket 7, socket 5 era (k5, k6, p3) with 256-512 memory max. There its nigh-impossible to evade caching when graphical browsing is required. Its better to upgrade those machines... typically 12% less memory at the price of performance.

In addition, in a 32/64bit system, whole userspace support library chain must be loaded.
For example, if you run i386 game and x64 game, then audio and graphical libraries will be loaded for both architectures in memory.
TL;DR while 32bit uses less, 32/64 mix uses more than even pure 64.

Not worth it and used only in a corner case when 64 version does not exist.

Forget about Gnome3 and KDE. Use any distro flavour with a lightweigth window manager (Xubuntu, Lubuntu,...). If it's not enough, install a really low resources window manager like fluxbox or fvwm.

I've recently installed Xubuntu in some older machines and it runs fine (including an intel atom n450 with 1gb ram, and an old pentium-m -centrino-).

If your processor supports 64 bits, install the 64 bits version.

My system is a Dell Inspiron 5100

P4 2.4GHz
1GB RAM

I've had a fairly recent version of Mint on it at some point in the past year from a live-"CD" USB drive. However, I have no USB drive in the house that I can find (we moved in August and they seem to have vaporized). And my desktop DVD burners were IDE and I upgraded to a SATA-only MOBO last year, so the only burner I have is on the Dell laptop and it's just a CD burner.

I want to access my Google drive and do some writing in bed on Saturday mornings, so I took back the laptop from the kids (sorry kids! I'll put Putt-Putt back on!) and re-enabled all of the internet settings. But it had Win XP and I don't want it on the Internet. So I looked around for a distro that would fit on a CD-RW and ran into several. But Puppy was very cute, usable, had a Ubuntu-based version (hopefully will support Putt-Putt and Pajama Sam and Freddie Fish), and had very thorough tutorials (I'm much better with Linux these days, but I still like tutorials). But mostly cute. So I installed it and cello! It works!

Not having DVD reader nor bootable usb could be a problem. Latest ubuntu versions don't fit in a CD. However you can use the "Minimal CD" installation (read about it here).

That P4 should run fine. At least, better than my Intel Atom, and I have played some games on it through Wine (Thief, Commandos2) or virtual machines (Edna and Harvey series)

PD: I would not install Precise Puppy, as it's based in older LTS version of Ubuntu, and supports for this version expires this year. Search for another version based in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.