Survey of CD "minimal" version by K. Knopper

[otropogo]

That's a clever idea. I imagine that it may be because:

1. USBs have gotten so much cheaper, r/w so much faster, and may have so much more capacity than a CD; and
2. perhaps CDRs may not have as good a reputation for (re)wriiting additional material to the same device.

Of course, that may not help much if your rig doesn't do USBs.

The requirement of Knoppix usb-flash to remain writable and mounted for the entire session has proven to be a repeat disaster for me. I've had at least four such installations corrupted beyond repair.

The Puppy Linux USB flash installation, OTOH, which allows the user to utilize the usb flash media simply to boot with the linux loader, and then choose a configuration file and applications on any other medium, has been used by me thousands of times in several computers (as opposed to a few dozen boots with the fragile Knoppix usb flash installation), and I've only had on Puppy install go bad. I'd still be using puppy for 90 % of my online activity (as I have for several years) if it weren't for having to confine myself to a AMI UEFI crippled Asus laptop, for which I haven't yet found a way to boot puppy. Unfortunately, Knoppix doesn't do so well with it either. I can't boot from the Live-DVD (the BIOS simply doesn't recognize it as a bootable device), so I have to sneaker-net over to a non-UEFI Windows 7 PC in order to make a usb-flash install that will barely work (the AMI BIOS will not retain the boot priority settings, returning Windows to the top position automatically). Booting Knoppix has become a five minute exercise, and so I barely use Linux anymore, and instead work with the worst OS I've experienced since OS/2 Warp, Windows 8.x.

[utu]

The requirement of Knoppix usb-flash to remain writable and mounted for the entire session has proven to be a repeat disaster for me. I've had at least four such installations corrupted beyond repair.

The Puppy Linux USB flash installation, OTOH, which allows the user to utilize the usb flash media simply to boot with the linux loader, and then choose a configuration file and applications on any other medium, has been used by me thousands of times in several computers (as opposed to a few dozen boots with the fragile Knoppix usb flash installation), and I've only had on Puppy install go bad. I'd still be using puppy for 90 % of my online activity (as I have for several years) if it weren't for having to confine myself to a AMI UEFI crippled Asus laptop, for which I haven't yet found a way to boot puppy. Unfortunately, Knoppix doesn't do so well with it either. I can't boot from the Live-DVD (the BIOS simply doesn't recognize it as a bootable device), so I have to sneaker-net over to a non-UEFI Windows 7 PC in order to make a usb-flash install that will barely work (the AMI BIOS will not retain the boot priority settings, returning Windows to the top position automatically). Booting Knoppix has become a five minute exercise, and so I barely use Linux anymore, and instead work with the worst OS I've experienced since OS/2 Warp, Windows 8.x.

There are several ideas worthy of independent threads here.
Unfortunately, they don't belong in Werner's survey thread.
I suggest you create one or more threads under General Support and get some responses that way.
And, it always helps to keep each thread focused on pretty much a single idea, not several unrelated ideas.
For example, there are several ways to insure against losing your persistence info; ask about that in another thread.