Help and support

Care for some bedtime reading?

Keeping away from mainstream desktop environments and apps means these lightweight distros aren’t the most straightforward and intuitive to operate. You’ll need some good avenues of documentation and support if you plan to use them on a regular basis. Once again, the candidates are all fairly equally matched in this aspect.

Bionicpup has ample documentation. The distro bundles help documentation on several topics, such as working with

Microsoft Office files, how to add codecs, installing software and more. Help pages also contain links to the documentation pages for most applications, and there’s a dedicated board on Puppy Linux’s forum.

Q4OS too hosts ample information to assist new users with installations. Besides the user-centric information, there’s also several pieces of administration and developer-orientated documentation. If you get stuck you can take your support queries to the forum boards. Both Bunsen and antix include pointers to documentation inside the distro. Bunsenlabs has a sub-menu of links which connect users to the support forums, Debian’s Handbook, the Arch Linux wiki and other support resources. antix includes lots of how-to articles, FAQS and quick tips to help familiarise users with the main components as well as videos to explain the most essential features. You can ask questions on the forums that include a board for new users.

The Tiny Core project has good information to help you get acquainted and understand how and why it is different from the others. All this information is also covered in a freely downloadable, Cc-licensed 163-page book.