The Linux ecosystem is vast and diverse, offering a multitude of distributions to suit every need and preference. With hundreds of distros to choose from, it’s a pity that most are rarely mentioned while the popular ones are constantly being regurgitated.

This thread aims to celebrate this diversity and shine a light on smaller projects with passionate developers. I invite you to pitch your favorite underappreciated distro and share your experiences with those lesser-known Linux distributions that deserve more attention.

While there are no strict rules or banlists, I encourage you to focus on truly niche or exotic distributions rather than the more commonly discussed ones. Consider touching upon what makes your chosen distro unique:

  • What features or philosophies set it apart?
  • Why do you favor it over other distros, including the popular ones? (Beyond “It just works.”)
  • In what situations would you recommend it to others?

Whether it’s a specialized distro for a particular use case or a general-purpose OS with a unique twist, let’s explore the road less traveled in the Linux landscape. Your insights could introduce fellow enthusiasts to their next favorite distribution!

  • puppy@lemmy.world
    802·
    2 months ago

    Haha nice try. If everyone starts liking it then it won’t be niche anymore. So I won’t share it! /s

  • hitwright@lemmy.world
    17·
    2 months ago

    Guix - It’s basically an abstraction over software compilation and distribution. It uses guile lisp language as glue to bind it all together. (Full programming language to configure with)

    The beauty arises if you want to get a minimal os running with a single application and package it either as a full iso or a docker container you can. Or if you need to get an OS to run as your router.

    It’s also highly encourages free software to the point, that proprietary software actually feels like huge downgrade to include. (Compilation from source is always available)

    I’ve been using this only for 11 months. I’ve barely scratched the surface on what is possible. So I’m pretty sure I’m not making it justice on what a gem it is. For example: Only recently I started to use programs in an immutable way.

      • hitwright@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 months ago

        Since there are not many developers there are some build systems that are more prioritized than others. If you come from emacs side of things, it’s great. Rust is around 4 versions older. And the single developer recently burned out. The package manager is a lot like nixos, so every package requires work to introduce to the system.

          • Laser@feddit.org
            3·
            2 months ago

            The NixOS ecosystem while maybe sometimes both chaotic and heavily centralized just seems miles ahead of what Guix System has to offer unfortunately; nix is a weird language (I’m not qualified to rate it but people have called it a bad DSL), but it does the job, and there were some factors that ruled out Guix System for me. Secure Boot support was one of them, which NixOS doesn’t support “natively”, but there is Lanzaboote. For better or for worse this kind of forced me to look into flakes very early.

          • hitwright@lemmy.world
            2·
            2 months ago

            Thanks for the info, although versioning afaik not the thing that keeps it behind. There are tools to import the necessary packages with ‘guix import crate’. It automatically selects the necessary packages.

            Difficulties arise when Cargo.toml for example uses git as source. Then you have to pull and write specifications for not a standard package. The build system is isolated and cannot download anything off the internet.

            • iopq@lemmy.world
              3·
              2 months ago

              So what nix does is it hashes the inputs, so git still works even immutably if the hash matches

              • hitwright@lemmy.world
                2·
                2 months ago

                Does nix require the exact commit be written out for the package, or does it generate a hash during the build taking the newest git commit?

      • mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org
        4·
        2 months ago

        The guix manual is pretty well explained. Now i’m learning Guile (Scheme’s dialog) and learning to configure both guix and guix system.

        The fact of being able to revert system and home environment software installation and configuration without breaking anything, is too good to be true.

        It’s also very cool to define packages either as compiled software or source packages to compile.

  • bsergay@discuss.onlineOP
    172·
    2 months ago

    May as well contribute my own 😜.

    I’m an absolute sucker for exquisitely hardened distros. Hence, distros like Qubes OS and Kicksecure have rightfully caught my interest. However, the former’s hardware requirements are too harsh on the devices I currently own. While the latter relies on backports for security updates; which I’m not a fan of. Thankfully, there is also secureblue.

    Contrary to the others, secureblue is built on top of an ‘immutable’ and/or atomic base distro; namely Fedora Atomic. By which:

    • It’s protected against certain attacks.
    • Enables it to benefit from more recent advancements and developments that benefit security without foregoing robustness.

    If security is your top priority, Qubes OS is the gold standard. However, secureblue is a decent (albeit inferior) alternative if you prefer current and/or ‘immutable’/atomic distros.

    • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
      3·
      2 months ago

      More niche? Opensuse Kalpa.

      I started running it and their are some pains like figuring out which layer to install tablet driver software, undervolting software, and kde connect. Seam flatpak still sucks dick and the tray icon for it doesn’t work at all and it needs a ton of modifications to get things to where the native steam runtime just works, but still a fun experiment.

  • Presi300@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    2 months ago

    Alpine. The Linux, not GNU/Linux joke aside, Alpine’s kinda great. Light, fast, stable, great package manager. I’ve daily driven it on both a server and as my main distro and it’s pretty nice for both… Unless you’re on Nvidia.

    • wheeldawg@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 months ago

      Want there a post I saw just the other day about Nvidia starting to make open source releases with one of the upcoming driver updates? I just saw it yesterday and didn’t even think I checked it out yet but it’s somewhere here on my “look at better later” lists here.

      It would be fine then if that was true.

        • wheeldawg@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          1·
          2 months ago

          Well there goes that good news. I hadn’t finished looking into it, it’s still in a tab I stashed here somewhere.

    • Jolteon@lemmy.zip
      3·
      2 months ago

      Huh, I’d never actually considered that Alpine Linux existed as something other than a base for docker containers.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      5·
      2 months ago

      My first intro to it was with postmarketOS, and I have to say it felt super light and stable

  • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
    231·
    2 months ago

    Not a distro but Qubes. Incredible security and privacy out of the box. Not for everyone but absolutely one of the most interesting developments in the OS world in the past decade or two.

      • bsergay@discuss.onlineOP
        7·
        2 months ago

        Not the person you asked, but they might have referred to the fact that (technically) Qubes OS is not a Linux distro because it’s based on Xen instead. Though, even then, we might refer to it as a Xen distro (if anything).

    • hactar42@lemmy.world
      4·
      2 months ago

      I started using Crunchbang because it was so lightweight and ran great on Virtual Box on Windows 7. I stopped using it, when they stopped developing it. I wasn’t aware of ++. I will be installing it this evening.

    • rescue_toaster@lemm.ee
      6·
      2 months ago

      My first linux install was crunchbang. I don’t remember why I picked it. Perhaps i liked the minimalistic look. Ended up not really liking openbox and I vaguely remember running into some problem with debian’s old packages, though I honestly can’t remember what. So I switched to ubuntu, which was great for me as a linux noob.

    • Handles@leminal.spaceEnglish
      3·
      2 months ago

      I know this might be asking for trouble, but how does BunsenLabs compare to CB++? I know they both came out of Crunchbang but I went with BL when that died.

      These days I’m on EndeavourOS, but I still use Openbox instead of DEs and customize it to look as much like Crunchbang as possible 😄

      Edit: also, I feel naked without Conky on my desktop.

      • richieadler@lemmy.myserv.one
        3·
        2 months ago

        how does BunsenLabs compare to CB++? I know they both came out of Crunchbang but I went with BL when that died.

        Also interested. Same scenario.

  • Dario@feddit.it
    27·
    2 months ago

    I have yet to read of a truly obscure distribution, so here is mine: Parabola GNU/Linux-libre. It is Arch Linux minus non-free software - every bit of software considered not fully free is rigorously left out. In respect to other GNU/Linux distributions, its stance against non free software is very strict. It is one of a handful of GNU/Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation. I have used it as my main operating system for more than ten years. The absence of proprietary firmware can be troublesome for most. While officially unsupported, it is technically possible to load proprietary firmware, but you may need to jump through hoops to install and use some proprietary software as is the case for proprietary firmware. Another downside is that some packages, especially from the KDE project, can be outdated due to lack of manpower.

    • ___@l.djw.liEnglish
      4·
      2 months ago

      That sounds like true freedom, and also like something I wish deeply that I had time and energy to make my daily driver - I’m a purist, but I’m also a pragmatist and i can feel the burnout already.

      Respect for using it as a daily driver - even for a personal only machine, that’s a pretty high bar, especially long term.

    • barsquid@lemmy.world
      101·
      2 months ago

      The atomicity probably counts as an interesting feature, but it does seem to be getting more popular.

    • walden@sub.wetshaving.social
      61·
      2 months ago

      I installed it on my Desktop, replacing LMDE. Unfortunately I have trouble running the one game that I play even though it works on Linux with Steam. It worked in Linux Mint, but for some reason it won’t start in Bazzite. Surely it’s because I have an Nvidia graphics card, but that wasn’t a problem with Linux Mint.

      Another problem that I ran into was Firefox (flatpak) crashing all the time. Luckily you just have to disable wayland using Flatseal, but I still get graphics glitches with it.

      I’m thinking of restoring my Linux Mint backup.

      I don’t know why I’m responding to your comment, I just wanted to share my experience, I guess.

  • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
    3·
    2 months ago

    Is Alpine Linux obscure? Well, using it as a desktop is obscure, I guess. The decision to use musl libc is the main limiting factor for desktop usage, but thanks to the existence of runtime package managers like flatpak and/or static linking, you can run basically anything that requires glibc on Alpine these days (at the expense of extra disk usage for glibc libs).

    If you don’t know much about Alpine, it is an extremely lightweight Linux distro designed primarily for containers and virtualization, that ships with busybox and musl libc. It’s basically the closest you can get to GNU/Linux without the GNU. The main appeal to me is the simplicity of the tooling and installation, it’s the only Linux distribution I’ve used that gives me a similar vibe to OpenBSD. The defaults are almost perfect, but the first thing I would do when installing it is install the docs metapackage (otherwise you have no manpages), and optionally replace busybox with coreutils and friends (personally can’t stand how non-posix compliant busybox is). I’d also replace the default busybox ash shell with a nice kornlike such as oksh, a clone of the OpenBSD shell.

    • Petter1@lemm.ee
      2·
      2 months ago

      I had PostmarkedOS, which is Alpine with some extra phone stuff

      We need more arm packages…