PorteuX

PorteuX is a Linux distro based on Slackware, inspired by Slax and Porteus and available to the public for free under GPL. Its main goal is to be super fast, small, portable, modular and immutable (if the user wants so).

• Lightweight and slim: The ISOs are small (~600 MB), including the most recent kernel and desktop environments (Cinnamon, COSMIC, GNOME, KDE, LXDE, LXQt, MATE, and Xfce). The after-boot RAM consumption is also optimized.

• Lightning fast: It runs in live session and uses zstd compression, among many other optimizations, making it able to boot up in 3 seconds. It's hard to find an experience as snappy as PorteuX. Even Clear Linux (RIP) or CachyOS can't keep up in benchmarks like Geekbench, Speedometer, and Unigine Superposition, to name just a few.

• Modular: It's composed of just five main modules (000-kernel, 001-core, 002-gui, 002-xtra and 003-desktopEnvironment). It means you can try a different desktop environment by simply changing one file, and the system will remain clean; no contamination from other desktop environment files or toolkits. You can also remove all modules except the kernel and core for a terminal-only experience with internet access.

• Immutable by design: Since these modules are read-only, the system can be made immutable if desired, improving privacy, being malware-proof and keeping the system always fresh. However, if you want, there are several ways to save your sessions: automatic saving, a .dat container, module saving, or scripted copies.

• Download and load modules instantaneously: Additional modules can be downloaded from PorteuX App Store, and thanks to their design, you can load or unload an application module in literally less than a second.

• Reversible updates: Thanks to its modular nature, reverting an update is as simple as moving or renaming the current modules and copying in the older versions.

• Portable: There's no installation process, so you can simply copy the ISO content to any storage unit (including but not limited to USB sticks) and plug it into any computer. Your system and settings will be right there, without needing any additional setup. It's truly plug and play. For better performance though it's recommended to use it on a SSD or NVMe.

• Comprehensive multimedia support: PorteuX can open basically any multimedia file out of the box and will automatically enable hardware acceleration if your machine supports it.

• Vulkan out of the box: Enabling OpenCL is also very simple, as described in the README on GitHub page. There's even a developer module that makes building things easy.

• Bleeding edge: Unlike some lightweight distros that ship ancient kernels and packages (sometimes not even a proper desktop environment), PorteuX delivers what's most recent on Linux in a pleasant experience.