Porteus 5.0

Mayank Sharma has a soft spot for portable distros, and wonders if the latest Porteus can wean him away from his all-time favourite, Slax.

- Mayank Sharma

IN BRIEF

Porteus is a Slackware-based portable distro that’s been designed and optimised to run from all kinds of removable media, including USB disks, SD cards and even CDs. It offers multiple desktop environments, from lightweight ones to fully fledged desktops, for appealing to a wide number of people

SPECS

Minimum:

CPU: 32- or 64-bit x86 processor

Memory: 768MB

HDD: not required

Build: x86, x86-64

Porteus 5 is the latest edition of one of the best portable and well-established distros. The Slackware 15-based distro now offers seven separate ISO images, each with a different desktop, from fully-fledged options such as Cinnamon and KDE to lightweight ones such as LXQt, LXDE, Openbox and more.

The ISOs of most editions weigh in at around 300MB thanks to Porteus' design that keeps the distro in a compressed state, only creating the familiar Linux directory structure on the fly during boot.