WattOS R12

Nate Drake explores how WattOS can bring your ancient hardware to life with this zippy, if spartan Linux distro.

- Nate Drake

SPECS

CPU: 1GHz 64-bit

Mem: 512MB

HDD: 10GB

Builds: 86_64

We love lightweight distros. This is why we reviewed some of the best of them in LXF295, but WattOS didn’t make the cut, because a new version hadn’t been released since 2016.

This is most likely because WattOS is the creation of just one man: Ronald Ropp, aka Biff Baxter, who started development of the distro in July 2008. Unlike previous versions, WattOS R12 is based on Debian, not Ubuntu, which in theory makes for a much more stable operating system. This is reflected in the bundled apps, such as Firefox 102.4 ESR (Extended Support Release). Using Debian alone usually means you have to do extra tinkering to install the latest versions of programs, but WattOS has taken care of this for you, supporting installation via both Flatpak and Debian backports.

Set up is very simple via the