Lucid Puppy consists of the popular Puppy Linux architecture that Puppy founder Barry Kauler has been refining through 4 editions of Puppy Linux.  But this time Puppy is built with binary packages from the latest Ubuntu release Lucid Lynx, hence Lucid Puppy 5.0.  The Puppy architecture is well known to be lean and fast, and friendly and fun, and Lucid Puppy is no exception.  

Because of the Ubuntu binary files, the development time to produce program packages  that are tested and configured for Lucid Puppy is extremely short.  In fact, one thing that is new in Lucid  Puppy is Quickpet, offering many Linux programs ready to use with a single click.  So, click, and you can be using Gimp to edit pictures, Kompozer to build a web site, Songbird to manage your music collection, and many others.   Because Puppy is built for personal computers, there is a choice in browsers: the four main ones, Firefox, Seamonkey, Chromium, and Opera are all also available for one-click installation.  Some people even like to alternate browsers so Lucid Puppy has a simple program to select whichever of the browsers you would like to set as default.

Another thing about Lucid Puppy is that it boots directly to the desktop.   Many people will not need to do anything more than that in order to begin using Lucid Puppy.  However, if there is anything you want to change, the tools to personalize the desktop are all immediately at hand.  Locale and Language can be changed with just one click and many of the programs, including the word processor Abiword, the spreadsheet Gnumeric, the text editor Geany, and the browser Chromium, open immediately in the language of choice.  For other programs such as Firefox, selecting one’s language involves just a few more clicks than that.  Yet another of the tools that needs very few clicks is a new tool for connecting to the Internet, named  Simple Network Setup, which it is.  Lucid Puppy also has a very simple, one-click Update feature to download and install any necessary bugfixes.

Here is one other thing about Lucid Puppy that is kind of interesting: it is the first major edition of Puppy Linux (1 through 4, and now 5) that was not directly prepared by Barry Kauler.  For this 5th Puppy, it was the entire Puppy community that did the work, with Mick Amadio, Chief Developer, and Larry Short, Coordinator.