Now, I am a total and complete stumbleupon addict. No jokes, no lies. So, I was stumbling the today and came across Puppy Linux. Now, on the surface its nothing special. Just another live OS similar to what every major distribution is publishing to win over the swing os users, "Hey just try our OS for like 5 minutes, you dont even have to install, just burn this cd and be amazed." You know, because being free just doesn't cut it, you have to be free, do everything they need, and give great head just to get someone to use your awesome software. (Something isn't useful unless you pay for it, right KGB?)

Moving on.

Puppy Linux is pretty cool because at boot time you decide which program modules are going to be loaded onto the ramdisk the whole OS runs off of the entire time you use it. It minimizes any disk usage to read/writing working files. Bingo, exactly what you need to maximize the lifetime of your SSD.

Why is this important?

Well, solid state disks are the future of computing, no arguments from anyone, anywhere. Less power, no moving parts, smaller footprint for more room... in 3 - 5 years. The rub is that the hardware has limited write cycles, and for power users this can be a huge problem. Though the writes are rated at millions to tens of millions, spread out across your hardware, when you get a terabyte chip embedded in your arm, you don't want it wearing out in five years. Personally I'd want a large amount of volatile ram that doesn't have these encroaching write errors doing most of the work.

But really, in 5 years I bet we won't even be worrying about that.