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!

    • Justine Smithies@lemmy.world
      0·
      4 months ago

      Same as a Chimera Linux user I’d definitely recommend trying it. I was a Void user beforee and was Swithering whether to go full BSD when I stumbled across Chimera which gives me the best of both worlds.

      • Uli@sopuli.xyz
        0·
        4 months ago

        I finally got fed up with my Windows machine and upon seeing symptoms of motherboard failure, I’ve ordered all the parts for a new rig and intend on installing Linux as my primary OS.

        Haven’t decided on a distro yet. I’m a DevOps engineer with a few passion projects, so I plan on setting up a couple of kubernetes clusters where I can play. I do all the usual things (word processing, gaming, web browsing, multimedia, etc), plus some AI stuff (stable diffusion, local LLMs, OpenCV). Ideally don’t want to have to fuss with drivers too much, but I don’t mind getting my hands dirty every now and then.

        Is Chimera the kind of distro I should be looking at, or should I pick something else for my first go at full-time Linux?

        • LeFantome@programming.dev
          0·
          3 months ago

          Chimera Linux is awesome but it is still in Alpha. I would not recommend it as a first distro at this point unless you have a very tinker personality. It is high quality but lacks polish. For example, it does not have a real installer yet ( more of a set of instructions ).

        • dotslashme@infosec.pubEnglish
          0·
          4 months ago

          My reason for not using Chimera as a daily driver is because I am a developer and there are still packages I need, that require libc still. My only advice would be to look through their packages and make sure you can find the things you need in there. If not, you need to research if the package you want is available through some other source and can run with musl instead of libc.

          • LeFantome@programming.dev
            0·
            3 months ago

            Sound reasoning. That said…

            Have you considered using Distrobox?

            You can use Distrobox to crate a dev environment on Chimera based on a glibc distro ( like Arch for example with its 80,000 up-to-date packages ).

            This has the added bonus of keeping your dev environment somewhat apart from your main install. If you ever want a clean slate ( too many junk packages accumulated or you mess something up ), you can refresh your dev environment without impacting your main desktop. You can also have multiple dev environments for different projects.

            Small nit-pick: MUSL is libc too. I think you meant to say Glibc ( the GNU libc implementation ).

            • dotslashme@infosec.pubEnglish
              0·
              3 months ago

              That is a case I had not considered, thank you for the suggestion, and thank you for the correction concerning glibc.

  • puppy@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

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

  • bsergay@discuss.onlineOP
    0·
    4 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.

    • walden@sub.wetshaving.social
      0·
      4 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.

      • Luden [comrade/them]@lemmy.ml
        0·
        3 months ago

        That Firefox bug is Mozilla’s fault and happens to anyone on Wayland + Nvidia right now. It’s fixed in the nightly Firefox build. There’s no official flatpaks for the nightly, but you can install it in distrobox and export it.

        I recommend hopping in their Discord for help with your game. The devs are always responding to folks in there.

    • barsquid@lemmy.world
      0·
      4 months ago

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

  • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
    0·
    4 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
        0·
        3 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).

  • TexasDrunk@lemmy.world
    0·
    4 months ago

    I have HoloISO running around on mini PCs because they just work as remote steam machines, can play games in their own right, and I can use them as media boxes if I want. I don’t necessarily recommend it, but it was super easy to install and configure except for the Bluetooth issue that cropped up occasionally where I had to unload and reload the Bluetooth module. Now I just have a script that automatically does that on boot because I can’t give a shit about fixing it.

    I also have a couple of Slax USBs running around. They used to be relatively popular with folks who fixed computers. I like building from modules and I’m familiar with Slackware so it was a good fit for a live environment.

    • ___@l.djw.liEnglish
      0·
      3 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.

    • rescue_toaster@lemm.ee
      0·
      4 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
      0·
      3 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
        0·
        3 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.

    • hactar42@lemmy.world
      0·
      3 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.

  • roux [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    4 months ago

    Not gonna lie, I thought elementaryOS was gonna take off and I guess it never did. I used it on my school laptop when I was in college for most of the time there. It was fine but mostly just a sleaker looking Mint basically.

  • Handles@leminal.spaceEnglish
    0·
    3 months ago

    Three days and nobody mentioned TempleOS? If attempting to build The Third Temple in the form of an OS isn’t niche and exotic, I don’t know what is. 🤣

    • Random Dent@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      3 months ago

      For anyone unfamliar:

      TempleOS (formerly J Operating System, LoseThos, and SparrowOS) is a biblical-themed lightweight operating system (OS) designed to be the Third Temple prophesied in the Bible. It was created by American programmer Terry A. Davis, who developed it alone over the course of a decade after a series of manic episodes that he later described as a revelation from God.

      Davis began developing TempleOS circa 2003. One of its early names was the “J Operating System” before renaming it to “LoseThos”, a reference to a scene from the 1986 film Platoon. In 2008, Davis wrote that LoseThos was “primarily for making video games. It has no networking or Internet support. As far as I’m concerned, that would be reinventing the wheel”. Another name he used was “SparrowOS” before settling on “TempleOS”. In mid-2013, his website announced: “God’s temple is finished. Now, God kills CIA until it spreads [sic].”

      Davis died after being hit by a train on August 11, 2018.

      TempleOS was written in a programming language developed by Davis as a middle ground between C and C++, originally called “C+” (C Plus), later renamed to “Holy C”, possibly a reference to the Holy See. It doubles as the shell language, enabling the writing and execution of entire applications from within the shell. The IDE that comes with TempleOS supports several features, such as embedding images in code. It uses a non-standard text format (known as DolDoc) which has support for hypertext links, images, and 3D meshes to be embedded into what are otherwise standard ASCII files; for example, a file can have a spinning 3D model of a tank as a comment in source code. Most code in the OS is JIT-compiled, and it is generally encouraged to use JIT compilation as opposed to creating binaries. Davis ultimately wrote over 100,000 lines of code for the OS.

      From Wikipedia

  • Presi300@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    4 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
      0·
      4 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.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      0·
      3 months ago

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

    • Jolteon@lemmy.zip
      0·
      3 months ago

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

  • pr06lefs@lemmy.ml
    0·
    4 months ago

    I think nixos is still niche, but seems to be gaining momentum. It has some unique features:

    • Every package has its own dependencies, so you can install a 7 year old firefox alongside the latest, and have no interference.
    • Packages with dependencies in common still share them (for space savings).
    • Abandons the HFS, but can still fake it for apps that need it.
    • Can make dev environments that are exactly reproducible across machines, and only exist within a specific shell session. So you can have a project that relies on an out of date version of a compiler, and another that uses the latest, and run both at the same time.
    • Make your own packages that other people can install using a git repo address.
    • The package language can also describe a machine’s configuration; systemd services, default packages, user accounts, etc.
    • You can build and remotely deploy a machine config in one line.
    • You can cross compile a machine config for another cpu architecture, like ARM.
    • OS upgrades are atomic, and reversible. If it doesn’t work out, you can go back to the previous config.
    • No reason to ever reinstall. Recently upgraded a machine that had sat in a closet for 5 years to the newest release. Flawless upgrade.
    • Nixos boasts more packages than any other distro, over 100,000.

    There are certainly downsides - poor docs, confusing core language. Instructions for installing something on say debian will not work on nixos. I do think this style of package management is the future, if perhaps not this specific implementation. It can be a pain but its also super solid.

      • LalSalaamComrade@lemmy.ml
        0·
        3 months ago

        Once the Prescheme project is revived, Guix will be even more faster, with the option to manage memory manually, wherever required.

        • Baleine@jlai.lu
          0·
          3 months ago

          It says on the webpage it has received a grant from NLnet, has it died since ?

          • LalSalaamComrade@lemmy.ml
            0·
            3 months ago

            It was announced a few months ago, so we’ll have to wait and see. If the maintain is open to mentorship, I’m jobless anyway, so I’d love to contribute.

    • thejevans@lemmy.ml
      0·
      4 months ago

      I use NixOS on my workstations, and I’m slowly migrating many of my server VMs over to it.

      NixOS w/flakes + home-manager + impermanence on zfs + disko w/ nixos-anywhere is amazing and gives an insane amount of declarative control over your system.

      That said, the current state of the leadership gives me pause to recommend it to anyone, and I do have a few devil’s advocate responses to some of what you said:

      Every package has its own dependencies, so you can install a 7 year old firefox alongside the latest, and have no interference.

      Unless the dependency is Qt, then it better all be the same version.

      Abandons the HFS, but can still fake it for apps that need it.

      Using ldd and nix-alien to patch in dynamic libraries still sucks, and often doesn’t work without a lot of extra effort. If what I want isn’t in nixpkgs, and I can’t get nix-alien to work on the first try, I just end up not using whatever I want trying to run.

      • pr06lefs@lemmy.ml
        0·
        4 months ago

        I hear you, its great for most cases, but when a package isn’t available or downloads binaries that depend on hfs it sucks. I’ve been going through hell with android dev lately and am currently doing my compiles on debian, lol.

  • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
    0·
    3 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
      0·
      3 months ago

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

      We need more arm packages…