WattOS R12
Nate Drake explores how WattOS can bring your ancient hardware to life with this zippy, if spartan Linux distro.
IN BRIEF
After six years in development limbo WattOS R12 is finally here. Now based on Debian 11, it still focuses on ease of setup and speed, running comfortably on older machines.
SPECS
CPU: 1GHz 64-bit Mem: 512MB HDD: 10GB Builds: 86_64
Welove 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.