Flavours and variants
Multiple versions for different niches and requirements.
Linux Lite is the easiest of the bunch to summarise because it only has one edition, which uses the Xfce desktop environment and with Ubuntu as its base distro. AntiX offers variants that make use of either Systemd or an alternative, Runit. The ‘full’ variant comes with a choice of four switchable, lightweight window managers and a range of apps. It’s the recommended release, and the one we chose. There are also lighter variants that scale all the way down to one with no GUI.
Porteus is based on Slackware and comes with 32-bit and 64-bit options. There are seven variants with different desktops. We’re sometimes a bit wary of distros that offer a lot of different desktops as, naturally, the application selection can never be as carefully honed. However, Porteus offers a minimalist application selection to be expanded upon anyway. There is also a kiosk edition. We chose the Cinnamon desktop version because this gives a good balance between features and looks.
Ubuntu comes in a number of different flavours, each with a different desktop and set of applications. We’ve decided to use standard Ubuntu and to install the ISO to a flash drive using
MKUSB. This makes it so that changes to files in the home directory and any system changes are permanent.
EasyOS uses parts from Puppy Linux and Debian, but it deviates from typical Linux distros in a number of ways in terms of how it manages things like the root user, giving it less in common with the base distro than most Linux distributions.