I've been very happy to discover that Puppy 5 has been a quite stable overall "Just works" daily use distro.

Less so from trying HD installs on some hardware, but running from CD/DVD or Flashdrives seems to be a winner. Which seems nicely in keeping with my preferred mode of having the OS and Userdata on separate devices. Oh- there's a zone of having "some" archival stuff on the slack space of an OS device, but NEVER as the "only copy" of anything worth worrying about losing.

That concept is incredibly NEAT to use easily due to how Puppy's Pmount utility displays drives on the desktop with a prominent green DOT to indicate a drive's mounted. Yeah- that's a small trivial seeming thing but it's an example of how Puppy's methods work for me. I keep a shoebox of older ~20- 250 gig drives around as archived buckets of "if I missed something" history and using the IDE>USB cable trick allows me to painlessly take a drive from the box-copy whatever is needed for a mule 'puter around here onto the drive and NOT worry about leaving space for an OS etc. Boring stuff like pictures of Catfish contests etc get set up as a slide show on a guest computer running Puppy from CD or an internal Flashdrive.

For me personally, booting Puppy from a Flashdrive makes whatever 'puter I am sitting at closer to "Mine" than many other tricks I've used with "less" chance of leaving traces of even trivial data on whatever HD's are in the machine I'm using. Last I checked- writing to an UNMOUNTED drive's not a worry eh?

More details going up on my blog..