A frugal, portable and flexible OS.

Vanilla Dpup is a small and lightweight operating system based on Puppy Linux and Debian.

It tries to strike the right balance between small and practical. Like the former, it feels like a journey to the 2000s and features a curated selection of preconfigured, lightweight applications for a variety of daily computing tasks, from web browsing to backup and recovery. Like the latter, it features wide hardware support and compatibility with the world's top collections of free software.

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Vanilla Dpup 9.3.x (Stable)

This release series is based on Debian Bullseye packages and cuts the amount of technical debt and legacy cruft accumulated in Puppy Linux throughout the years, to prepare for big and disruptive changes like the deprecation of X.Org and GTK+ 2 in favor of Wayland and GTK+ 3 or 4, and the adoption of overlay as a replacement for aufs.

Those familiar with Puppy Linux will enjoy improved responsiveness, low resource usage, reliable package management with apt-get, GTK+ 3 ports of of classic themes, GTK+ 3 ports of lightweight applications lost to time, Bluetooth audio support, fast web browsing thanks to DNS caching, ad blocking and privacy tweaks, shell completion, man pages, keyboard shortcuts, easy installation of drivers and multi-language support.

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Vanilla Dpup 10.x (Testing)

This version is on track for release in early to mid 2023. Although it looks like 9.3.x, it tracks Debian Bookworm and everything under the hood is newer.

It uses the much newer 6.1.x kernel series, modernizes Bluetooth audio and screen capture support by replacing PulseAudio with PipeWire, adds Landlock-based sandboxing for internet-facing applications and adds a Wayland flavor.

Flavor X.Org Xwayland
Tagline The safe bet The best of both worlds, mostly
Ease of Migration from 9.3.x Trivial Easy
VSync Requires compositor Built-in
Suitable for Gaming Yes Mostly yes
Range of Supported GPUs Wide Limited
Multi-Monitor Support Normal With caveats
HiDPI Support Limited With caveats
Flatpak Support Limited Better
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Vanilla Dpup 11.x (Unstable)

This version is in early development, tracks Debian Sid and completes the multi-year migration effort to Wayland by replacing the traditional Puppy desktop with labwc and sfwbar.

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