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·
    6 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
    18·
    6 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·
        6 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·
            6 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·
            6 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·
              6 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·
                6 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·
        6 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·
    6 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.

  • Presi300@lemmy.worldEnglish
    33·
    6 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·
      6 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·
          6 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.

    • tetris11@lemmy.ml
      5·
      6 months ago

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

    • Jolteon@lemmy.zip
      3·
      6 months ago

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

    • ___@l.djw.liEnglish
      4·
      6 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.

  • claymore@pawb.social
    23·
    6 months ago

    Void is my favourite distro, although I haven’t used it for a while. Extremely fast package manager, rolling release but not bleeding edge, super simple, very fun to tinker with (more than Arch imo). I stopped using it because I wanted something more popular for easier troubleshooting. But if I ever get a secondary PC/laptop I’ll probably start using it again.

    • cerement@slrpnk.net
      12·
      6 months ago

      take a look at Alpine Linux – Alpine, Void, and Gentoo all grew out of a similar “Linux plus BSD” attitude – Alpine’s package manager is as fast or faster than Void’s – Alpine is pretty under-represented (but not absent) on the desktop side of things while being rather over-represented in the container, VM, server side of things (meaning the small community tends to be rather admin heavy)

      • claymore@pawb.social
        4·
        6 months ago

        Oh I know about alpine, sadly it didn’t “click” the same way void did and felt more like a distro to use in embedded systems or similar space constrained situations. Gentoo on the other hand I like, but the initial setup + waiting for stuff to compile put me off of it. Maybe I’ll try it again sometime with all precompiled packages.

        • Drito@sh.itjust.works
          1·
          6 months ago

          I’m annoyed by these Gnome centered distros. If I had to choose a single DE for a distro, I 'd choose a flexible one that can run on potatoes, such as Xfce. I suppose Xfce as default is a part of the MX linux popularity.

          • LeFantome@programming.dev
            1·
            5 months ago

            I agree with this. In the case of Chimera Linux, it is a goal of the distro to have “no legacy” and so it is Wayland and Pipewire only from the start. That limited their choices back when they were making the decision.

            Xfce is still X only although they are making progress.

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

        Underrepresented at best, at worst it’s arguably too easy to forget that Alpine is more than just container images.

        Not sure how to solve that problem, it’s my go to for rolling an image but wouldn’t normally make the shortlist for standalone machines. In a prod env, that’s basically Deb, RHEL derivatives, etc. In a personal env for me, Arch derivs tend to win out on non-critical services if only because I invariably learn something useful that I wouldn’t want to learn in prod.

  • pr06lefs@lemmy.ml
    474·
    6 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.

    • thejevans@lemmy.ml
      17·
      6 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 was trying to run.

      • pr06lefs@lemmy.ml
        9·
        6 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.

  • averyminya@beehaw.org
    171·
    6 months ago

    I like TailsOS, which is an amnesiac system that runs entirely in RAM and boots from a USB hard drive. The goal for the operating system is to be a safe operating system for people who are in compromising situations - from international reporters to survivors of domestic abuse, it is a way to highly reduce your ability to be tracked.

    The downsides of amnesiac systems are obvious - without enabling the setting for permanent storage, effectively everything you do on the OS is lost every time. And if you do enable persistent memory, well, that’s not exactly entirely safe if you are caught out.

    What I like the OS for though is as someone who is not compromised or in a situation where I need these privacies (despite appreciating them), my usage of it makes it safer for others who are using it (since internet is through Tor), and I feel more comfortable using computers in the wild when needed, since I’m not logging in on the public operating system that will be used by everybody else.

    Many people give these projects flack or diminish their values as a “daily driver”, but I think often times forget the important aspects of them. They may not be a daily driver for you or I by nature of our needs, but they are certainly important daily drivers for others. In addition to that, supporting a project that helps people in compromised situations and becoming another node to bounce off of (again, Tor, not inherent to the usage of this OS) is a nice additional benefit.

    Tl;DR amnesiac operating systems because they’re simple, straightforward, and make you feel more like whitehat hackerman when you’ve done nothing at all.

    • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
      3·
      6 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.

  • makeasnek@lemmy.mlEnglish
    231·
    6 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·
        6 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).

  • ssm@lemmy.sdf.org
    3·
    6 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·
      6 months ago

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

      We need more arm packages…