All of the below are specifically designed to be run without a traditional installation process, each with their own elaborate persistence schemes (which go far

All of the below are specifically designed to be run without a traditional installation process, each with their own elaborate persistence schemes (which go far beyond your regular distro's live cd + persistence) (listed in my personal order of preference) 1. Fatdog64 Puppy linux inspired, but really it's own distro. Built from the ground up (LFS & BLFS), with careful attention applied to minimizing dependencies. Resulting in a very lean setup. They use Slackware's basic pkging tools, but again - they build everything from scratch. So you can think of it as an "alternative minimalistic Slackware", done by someone other than Patrick V. The layered filesystem is done a bit better than puppy linux (IMHO), and unlike puppy, it can be configured as a proper multiuser system. The more you delve into Fatdog's innards, the thoughtfulness behind its basic design shows through. Included are a range of scripts to quickly run fatdog within fatdog (to compile and test new pkgs, or just to sandbox an app, or whatever). Also, the entire set of build "recipes" used to create the set of slackware'd tarballs which make up Fatdog are themselves provided. For what it's worth, I moved some of my boxes onto Fatdog many years ago, after 10+ years of being purely on gentoo. 2. puppy linux VoidPup is my favorite here. 3. pure Slackware? Porteus. I used this quite heavily a decade ago. It has been refreshed to Slackware15. Portuex ( a derived fork, see it in the portues forum) tracks slackware current, so it should be very up-to-date. 4. Debian-based? AntiX (very lean, with runit and nicely pre-configured window managers) or MX (more mainstream debian). You can think of them as 2 flavors maintained by essentially the same group of developers. Consider AntiX, with repo's switched to sid.