Blue Pup For Linux

Blue Pup is an open source operating system based on the minimal Puppy Linux distribution and heavily inspired by the Metro interface used in the commercial Microsoft Windows 8 OS. It has been designed with a single goal in mind, to make the transition of Windows users to Linux as hassle-free as possible.

The distribution can be downloaded from Softpedia as a single IMG file archived with the performant XZ compression algorithm. Once extracted, the image must be written to a USB flash drive of 8GB or higher capacity in order to boot it from the BIOS of a PC.

No one thought that this would be possible nor did they think that this would occur, Metro user interface for Linux distributions. Well, Blue Pup is here to prove you wrong, as it uses a Metro-like interface on top of a lightweight JWM (Joe's Window Manager) graphical desktop environment.

The bootable medium has been designed to drop the user to the Metro interface by default. To access the standard desktop environment, one must press the ALT+F4 key combination. Among the preinstalled applications, we can mention the Mozilla Thunderbird email and news client, Chromium web browser, Tickr RSS reader, and Skype VoIP client.

The distirbution comes with Puppy Linux-specific utilities, such as the PupControl panel, PupSnap screen capture utility, PupClockset manager, wmctrl to control a NetWM/EWMH compatible X Window Manager, as well as extra codecs for the Chromium web browser and the Adobe Flash Player.

We have no idea if Blue Pup is here to stay, but it definitely proved that innovation still exists in the GNU/Linux ecosystem. It is the perfect operating system to try if you want to migrate from a Windows 8 system to Linux.