The first one that came to mind was fli4l (Floppy ISDN for Linux). Originally a distro of German origin that fit on a single floppy disk to turn a 386 or 486 PC into a router for ISDN connections. Last I looked it’s still actively worked on.
There are probably tons of more obsuce ones. But this is one I actually used.
I’ve recently gone through my dad’s floppies and found one with fli4l.
Linux STD! Waaaay before skiddos had backtrack or kali
That’s an…interesting name.
C programming language also uses STD in a lot of the standard library names (short for standard). I wonder if the creators of both didn’t realize when they named it or did and thought it was funny. My bet is the latter.
Security Tools Distribution :)
floppyfw : turn a floppy into a firewall
Wait what? :o
Floppy distros were all the rage. Here’s another one, still got a few floppies of it floating around the lab!
Yellow Dog
I actually ran this on a PPC Mac back in the day
Someone gave me a PowerMac and of course I had to try to run Linux. It was an interesting experience, it would boot to MacOS and then run the Yellow Dog bootloader. Couldn’t get it to boot directly. That little experiment showed me how tightly Apple controlled what would run on Apple machines back then.
That was the my first distro. Getting it to run off a FireWire drive was an interesting introduction to Linux.
Fun fact: yum stands for Yellow dog Update Manager. I know it’s been replaced by dnf but I still think that’s cool.
Take your pick from the Linux family tree
I don’t see nixos in there!
Should hyprland be in the table or are Wayland Compositors ignored? 👀
it’s only distros
it’s main feature is that it completely redefines the system’s root directory structure. the only reason i even know it exists is because i’m friends with one of the creators
Gobo Linux has to have been the distro I was looking forward to most too. I really hope it picks up because it’s design philosophies. Absolutely phenomenal.
I hear you saying “not compatible with FHS” but then extra words I no longer need to hear.
Bohdi linux. smoll and beautiful. Used to run it on my eeepc 701
That’s a blast from the past! I used to run #! On my 701…
Bohdi is pretty nice. Needed a Linux test device at a job a few years ago and for some reason this was one of the only ones approved. Was pretty solid for the few times I needed to use it.
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postmarketOS. Way too underrated.
No one ever mentions Crux Linux
I had no idea mageia existed until I met a dude who had it
elive
you think a distribution that automatically includes all the proprietary stuff that we use baked into the distro would be more popular since it makes linux ready to go for most people; but it still gets fewer than 300 clicks per month.
I feel like the Enlightenment desktop environment isn’t to everyone’s taste. It’s definitely got some idiosyncratic design choices…
automatically includes all the proprietary stuff
Jail.
Its unpopularity may be related to that it asks money or a positive review in a blog to even try. Used to be so a few years ago.
Doesn’t Pop!OS do that already?
And Ubuntu, no? Wasn’t that the big selling point of Ubuntu back in the day?
First I’m hearing of it. I’ma try it out
It made me lazy since they got everything to work out of the box. Lol
Obscure as in “only for a very specific purpose and nothing else”?..
Well, there is the Mircrosoft linux distro for their azure cloud
I guess DD-WRT as distro for router is also kind of obscure. Or the more general openWRT for embedded systems.
I haven’t tried all that many distros, but I’d say Puppy Linux. Pretty neat that it loads into RAM from USB and has fairly light memory requirements, but it does feel a little on the clunky side as far as configuration and stuff goes.
Clear Linux.
I imagine there was a time when this wasn’t obscure, but I’m guessing people today don’t remember Caldera OpenLinux. That was the first Linux distro I installed/used. A guy from church gave his copy.
Caldera eventually became SCO. But I’m pretty sure I was using Caldera OpenLinux before the whole Novell patent suit thing.
I never used Caldera Linux but I did use their DOS for a while.
Speaking of old, dead distros, my first Linux – sort of – was TurboLinux 6.0. I say “sort of” because I never successfully got it to install and run. : (
