Funny you should mention Pup. I’m using LxPup on USB right now, heh. I recommend it, it’s the best version of Puppy, IMO. I’ve used pretty much most of the Slacko and Puppy variants.
Tried the mini & mini linux distros you listed, too - they’re okay, but a bit too minimal for my doings. I test out several Linux distros a month, tonight or tomorrow I’m going to give Nanolinux a trial run.
I don’t play games much on Linux other than solitaire, chess and mahjong. On Lubuntu, the Ubuntu-based distro, I tried Wine to play a Windows game or two, works okay. There’s also “Steam” for Linux gaming, but not being into games much I’ve never used it.
You can never have too much backup. I had a 1 TB external drive that I used for backup, worked fine until it took a tumble. Now it just clicks. It’s dead,Jim.
I got a deal on a 1.5TB Seagate a coupe of years ago, should have grabbed both of them...half price...
I don’t do a lot of gaming, the newest one I Have I thnk is Return to Castle Wolfenstein, ran nice on a 1 Ghz machine with 256MB RAM...tells you how up to date on games I am...
But I like a few arcade type games, especially a few that were installed with Mandrake. Can’t find a version of Methane Brothers or Frozen Bubbles that will work, the only copy of Frozen Bubbles that is reliable only works on an older version of Java...Did get a couple of other cool ones that work well though, need to do a little more looking around. Just small, mindless arcade stuff though. I have Deus Ex and RTCW on this machine, both old favorites.