I am trying to speed up my peppermint 8 distro. It is good but has recently become laggy both using browser and loading applications.

I use peppermint from a usb with persistence. It is good but I know there are slowness isues in such a system and I have them.

I have read that puppy (and others) load from the RAM but the whole OS and latest work can be preserved on the RAM for recall.

My question is - is this RAM 'persistence' similar to persitence on the USB but faster, or and is it in some way less 'permanent' or prone to loss of data? Which is better puppy with RAM preservation or puppy with persistence (if this is not nonsense). Please do enlighten me.

Also I cannot find anything on creating persistence in a live usb puppy system. Is this because it is not needed due to the RAM preservation of data?

Finally, as I want a very fast light but full OS to mimic Ubuntu and its software offer which Puppy flavour will fulfil the above requirements?

Puppies have what's known as a savefile (and I recommnend saving your configs and apps in a file rather than a directory, and that on a partition formatted to ext2 to facilitate the encryption option). When I want to copy/backup a savefile I've been working on for a while, I boot Puppy with the option inserted after hitting F3 to get there, change the file's extension name to .2f_ from .2fs then copy it to a backup directory. Change extension back when needed.

Savefiles can grow according to what User desires to preserve. I'd say start about 768MB and grow from there. Speed of loading the file slows as it grows in size, but explore the options in puppy and find out for yourself!

One cannot preserve anything in RAM! I tried the other 'persistence' in distros like antiX and Porteus (another spin on persistence), but always use a puppy linux when I want to go that direction. Besides, puppy is a good troubleshooter and data recovery tool.

The only way to learn puppy is to run it and make mistakes until you don't.

Give it a shot. Fossapup based on 20.04 LTS is the newest one. Best wishes!

Hm.
Wouldn't it be better to analyze this first.
E.g., open a task manager and see what is eating your resources.
Or, have you installed applications that might be running in the background needlessly.
Or, is your hard drive dying.
Etc.