LEAF is a common choice when commercial NAT routers are insufficiently flexible or secure, or are unattractively nonconformant to open source philosophy.
[citation needed] LEAF is capable of running a powerful NAT firewall with several ancillary services on computer hardware generally considered obsolete, such as 486 workstations with no hard disk.
LEAF is intended to work well with read-only storage media, such as write-protected floppy drives or optical discs.
LEAF distributions typically include software designed to be economical in executable size, such as uClibc, BusyBox, Dropbear, and Shorewall.
LEAF's origins lie in Debian Sarge, though many boot processes and daemon control mechanisms have been modified heavily.