Along with Knoppix and Slax, Porteus remains one of the premier portable Linux distros. More comparable to Slax, Porteus is also based on Slackware, and is designed to be lightweight and fast. The website proudly proclaims Porteus will boot in 15 seconds on a modern PC, and our experiences have shown that they are generally correct about this. The new version of Porteus is based on the recent Slackware 14.0, and comes just over half year after 1.2.
The new version’s biggest difference is a switch to the Razor-qt desktop environment in the 32-bit versions, previously a position held by Trinity. Like Trinity, Razor-qt is a KDE 3 style environment, with a single panel along the bottom with an application menu. It’s quite fast, and has a little more functionality than something like XFCE or LXDE, albeit with a lot less bloat than full KDE or Cinnamon. The 64-bit version comes with a choice of KDE or LXDE as defaults, as Razor seems to only run on 32-bit systems. While this split is a little odd, both architectures have a dedicated XFCE remix, and you can of course install any other compatible environment to each version.