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.
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!
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.
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 I know it’s been replaced by dnf but I still think that’s cool.
The old PearOS(which looked like a meme-ish knockoff MacOS), UwUntu and Nyarch
Well I don’t hear much about Gentoo, Damn Small, Puppy or Knoppix anymore. Wonder if they still exist.
I haven’t done much disto hopping since I settled on Ubuntu around ‘08 and then on NixOS last year. I like my systems working when I need them and waiting around for a new install to finish is boring to me.
Gentoo’s forums are quite active and it’s one of my daily drivers. I think the others kinda faded away.
Gentoo still exists. Damn Small was dead for a decade but has risen again recently. Puppy is alive and well. Knoppix is still alive, but the last downloadable release is almost 4 years old.
DSL is basically an Antix spin now ( which is itself basically just Debian ).
Gentoo still exists 🙂
I use puppy from time to time. Works well.
I think NixOS has taken a bit of Gentoo’s mindshare. They solve similar problems with very different approaches.
How so? When I switched to NixOs I was looking for system stability over time. That’s not really something I associate with Gentoo, at least not on a desktop system.
but stability isn’t something that would drive a gentoo user away either.
a lot of the draw of gentoo from what I saw was being able to configure everything down to how it gets compiled. it’s simple to apply a patch to a package before it gets built or maintain a custom kernel config in nixos, as well as all the advantages of declarative os
They both allow you to deploy and update a highly customized OS across many potentially different machines.
Gentoo has cflags and cross-building
Nix has Nix configs
I somewhat disagree about the stability. Maybe it’s no longer the case, but i used gentoo for a few years in the 2010s and it was always stable for me. A buggy upstream release of a package could be a problem in theory, but if that were to happen you can generally roll back the package and mask it from updates for a while. I never ended up needing to do that. However i agree that stability seems to be a high priority for Nix devs.
I’m tracking now.
The instability I had on Gentoo was largely a result of me setting up the system one way, deciding I didn’t like it, uninstalling a bunch of stuff poorly and then building something new on top of it. All on the same install. For a little while though, I had a G3 Mac running headless as a small NAS. Never had a issue out of it but then I also never touched it except to update it, when I remembered it existed.
I found that Ubuntu was a more stable base for my mucking about. Then I got my first real job (truck driving) and didn’t have time fix my system constantly and learned to just use it.
My first real job was forklift driving on a warehouse dock, maybe we crossed paths
That would be cool. Unlikely, but cool. There are a lot more warehouses across the country than I thought before I joined the trucking industry. And some of them are stuck in some of the oddest places. The Tums factory turned out to be literally 1 block from the St. Louis Cardinal’s ballpark. Really wish I could have stuck around to be a tourist for an hour or two, but it took me that long just to get the trailer on their dock and they wanted me off the dock asap once they finished unloading.
Probably KaOS. It puts a strong focus on KDE and Qt.
As in, it doesn’t package programs using different GUI toolkits, aside from the most popular, like Firefox and GIMP. When I tried it a few years ago, you also had to enable a separate repo to get access to these.Reminds me of chakra linux. Same principals, except built on top of Arch base, and the other toolkit apps were distributed as self contained image files.
Not obscure but I love hyprland
Also not a distro.
Suicide linux. Nobody can run it for more than a day
Edit: i just searched “suicide linux” to see if it still exists and one of the top results was ian murdock’s wiki page, :(
“suicide linux”
Looked it up with quotes and the first update in the first search result:
Update 2011-12-26
Someone has turned Suicide Linux into a genuine Debian package. Good show!
:(
Hot Dog Linux, X11 Window Manager with Windows 3.1 Hot Dog Stand, Amiga Workbench, Atari ST GEM, Mac Classic and Aqua UI
One of the coolest distros, ever. It’s like a mix of Alpine Linux and Slackware without dangerous firmware payloads.
Smoothwall. I used to run it a lot back in the early 2000s for personal use and even helped set up a couple small businesses with it but I don’t hear of anyone else using it these days, people seem to love openwrt and pfsense more.
It was great for just taking any old x86 machine and making a powerful, fully featured firewall/router out of it, including a VPN server, all through a web interface. Nowadays that’s boring shit but in 2002 it was pretty cool.
Good old Smoothie. Served me well back then. I think it went commercial at some point.
We had this as the firewall in our school! I remember bypassing it in so many ways with Google DNS and whatnot.
Check out the random button on Distrowatch (distrowatch.com/random.php) - it’s like a Linux lottery, but you always win something weird!
Gentoo. Not that bad for a random pick.
This distro’s default background isn’t a knockoff of any particular popular non-*nix proprietary operating system’s default background:
Let’s make this a game. Click on it, then you have to install that on bare metal and daily it for a month.
Ha I got tuxedo OS, hopefully thats not too niche
That’s what I’ve been running on my gaming machine and it’s been great.
Got RISC OS
mom, I’m scared
Rockstor here. Which is interesting bc I’ve been thinking about setting up another NAS.
Oh god, I got Murena (LineageOS distro). How does one install that onto a ThinkPad T480…
What are you currently using?
On that ThinkPad, LMDE.
I got Plamo Linux
I got Linux Lite, which I’ve tried in the past.
Got PakOS, but since I’m not Pakistani I’m not sure how useful it would be
I got portuex, never used Slackware but seems serviceable, I’m just scared of nVidia driver setup haha
I got archcraft.
Lucky me. It’s also from India which is fun.
https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=archcraft
I’m gonna go with Tom’s Root Boot. Or maybe the father of all live distros, Knoppix.
Didn’t think Knoppix was obscure, but that was my gateway to Linux first on all my personal PCs.
I guess the years have passed it by.
most obscure and to me coolest but unfortunately not very active https://sourcemage.org/
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 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 created a distro once for class that just had diaspora installed on a live CD. It was only used for demos a looong time ago. DiasporaTest.
