2 days ago my friend found an old SATA hard drive and gave it to me to check what’s on it, and me, not having a disk station or anything, and against all better judgment, I just swapped the disk in my laptop for my friend’s, and instead of my laptop being fried it turned out the disk was running something called Crunchbang Linux
I loved that distro. Unfortunately it got discontinued at some point.
Jarro Negro. Made by Mexican students. And as far as I know, it’s independent, not based on another distro.
Yellow Dog
I actually ran this on a PPC Mac back in the day
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 I know it’s been replaced by dnf but I still think that’s cool.
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.
BOSS.
No one mentioned Bunsenlabs or Crunchbang Linux here, but they aren’t really that obscure.
KISS
it’s just a single bash script and a repository containing package definitions to compile them from source.
Basically LFS on drugs.
Interesting, was searching for anybody who mentioned LFS/Linux From Scratch leading here. Doesn’t seem active anymore though.
Limiting to those I have used daily and treated as Linux (used the terminal for example) probably Maemo. I used to carry my Nokia Internet Tablet 770, and then my N800 everywhere with me.
Maemo is also an ancestor of both Tizen and Sailfish OS
My first smart phone was a Nokia N9. I loved Meego which was between Maemo and sailfish. I hatred Microsoft before that, but them killing Nokia made my hate burn even brighter.
Yes, particularly the variant distributed on a business-card sized CD rom. To be carried in your wallet for emergency use.
deleted by creator
Oh jeez. I forgot about that. I had that running on my DS back in the day from a GBA flashcart with a big-ass CompactFlash card sticking out the bottom. Good times.
most obscure and to me coolest but unfortunately not very active https://sourcemage.org/
I remember reading about it like 10 years ago along with LunarLinux (e: and sorcerer) as was curious about other source based linux distros. I thought both were dead, glad that at least sourcemage is still alive
its always a bit hard to tell with source distros.
i was gonna say source mage! so i guess it’s not that obscure, if two of us thought to mention it.
I think its obscure but some wierdos geek out on it :)
I see no one has mentioned Bedrock Linux yet. Not sure though how others would rate its ‘obscurity’ though. It’s definitely a standout among distros.
hyperbola
they have a wiki with insane nonsens about why they don’t package certain things. Example:
pam
Package has different security-issues and is not oriented on the way of technical emancipation as Hyperbola is trying to adapt lightweight implementations.https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:incompatible_packages
was that translated into english from another language?
I love how they blended FAQ with meth-induced psychosis rambling.
I’ve gotta give them kudos for sticking to their very strict values, but holy hell is this hard to parse
Wow, you weren’t kidding.
Wait… they’re militant enough about Free Software to refuse to package anything even slightly non-Free, but their “final goal” is to switch the kernel to BSD (i.e. away from copyleft)? WTF?
but their “final goal” is to switch the kernel to BSD (i.e. away from copyleft)?
HyperbolaBSD is a hard fork, that relicenses the OpenBSD kernel as GPL (as permitted by permissive licenses.)
HyperbolaBSD has already dug into the OpenBSD source tree and discovered numerous licensing issues.
HyperbolaBSD will be a truly libre distro that takes advantage of copyleft, while moving away from the major issues Linux is stepping into too.
Ah, that’s different then!
Hmm…
From https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:manual:contrib:hyperbolabsd_faq:
HyperbolaBSD is under a progressive migration by replacing all non GPL-compatible code. It will be replaced with new compatible code under Simplified BSD License. We do this in order to incorporate GPL code from other projects such as ReactOS, as well new code from scratch.
It’s not clear to me that relicensing the existing code to GPL is what they’re planning on doing; it sounds more like they’re going to mix in GPL code but not change the existing files to GPL en masse after they finish harmonizing them to two-clause BSD.
Frankly, IMO that’s too bad: I’d love to see them make the whole shebang GPLv3-or-later
Related question: is all Linux kernel code required to be licensed GPLv2-only, or are individual contributions allowed to be GPLv2-or-later? I’d be nice to see if that project (and stuff like HURD and ReactOS) could benefit from at least some Linux contributions, even if they can’t copy it wholesale.
It’s an ancient divide in parts of the FOSS community that believes copyleft licenses are not “free” because they force you to license contributions under the same license.
Yeah, I know, but I would’ve expected a distro that describes itself as “GNU/Linux-libre” would fall on the other side of it!
Why did I read all of this.
Certain things? Fucking luddite idiots don’t package 99.9% of software.
AIX Unix from the 1980s is literally more useful than that heap of garbage
Why so much rage?
Yes, Hyperbola is very ideological and super strict, but it was always meant to be that way - to provide a system that works in some way and at the same time is as ethical and “clean” as possible. Some people value it over anything, and for them, Hyperbola is a good pick.
Have you ever heard of arch? That’s what I use by the way
Hardly obscure.
Kolibri
Kolibri isn’t a Linux distro, it is a fork of MenuetOS and not Linux at all
Thanks, I didn’t know that.
Np, another OS that isn’t Linux based, it’s rather obscure-ish but it’s genuinely impressive is Haiku OS, the community-driven spiritual successor of BeOS
United Linux - the famous Red Hat Enterprise Linux killer!
I worked on that.
It was SuSe with any branding or tools ripped out, the carcass kicked over the fence for the rest of us to try to make an OS out of.
It had no chance. What we got was a bleeding corpse after SuSE had a sellable product to compete against us all with.
It killed turbo, it killed conectiva and it killed openlinux. Horrible thing.
Chimera Linux
I had not noticed that KDE is available for Chimera now. Very cool.
