I was so impressed with the latest iteration of my oldest favorite mini distro, especially its KDE implementation, that I immediately wanted to make Granular’s next release look like and as fast as Slax. Slax 7 comes loaded with all the bare essentials that actually make sense. Plus its ability to run from a USB drive without much efforts makes it a winner to me.
Everything just works, very straightforwardly. It has a lot of stuff packed in a small size of 220MB, which is a marvelous feat (made possible by use of compressed/packaged modules). But it may or may not detect all of your hardware correctly. For me, it didn’t recognize my WiFi module, which I got working by installing the necessary firmware files (look here for instructions). My laptop’s (Synaptics) touchpad performed fine, but its vertical edge scrolling didn’t. I corrected that using the command synclient VertEdgeScroll=1.