Porteus

A modular, Slackware-based live distribution designed to boot in seconds from a USB stick and run entirely from RAM, with add-on software delivered as loadable compressed modules.

Lightweight & Old HardwarelightweightSlackware-basedmodularlive-USBruns-from-RAMDownload ↗Official site ↗Docs / Wiki ↗

Based on

Slackware

First released

2010

Package manager

Slackware packages + Porteus modules (.xzm)

Desktop environments

Xfce, KDE Plasma, MATE, and others, selectable per edition

Porteus is built around a modular '.xzm' module system: rather than installing packages that permanently modify the filesystem, extra software ships as compressed modules that get mounted and unmounted on the fly, keeping the core system small while still allowing a large effective software library. It's optimized specifically for extremely fast boot times and running fully from RAM once loaded, similar in spirit to Puppy Linux and Tiny Core but built on a Slackware package base rather than an independent one. It's popular for USB-drive 'carry your OS with you' use cases and for quickly spinning up a known-good, unmodified environment on borrowed hardware.

MirrorNest doesn't mirror distro ISOs — installation media should always come straight from the project's own official download page (linked above), so you get the correct checksum/signature to verify against.