Hey fellow Linux enthusiasts! I’m curious to know if any of you use a less popular, obscure or exotic Linux distribution. What motivated you to choose that distribution over the more mainstream ones? I’d love to hear about your experiences and any unique features or benefits that drew you to your chosen distribution.
I use Ubuntu, which is apparently the least popular distro around.
I use Manjaro and based on the downvotes I received when mentioning it around here, I can assure that you are excused and you can give me this crown.
Lol same. When I installed Manjaro it was a popular choice, but in the past couple years sentiment has really turned against it. I haven’t experienced any of the problems people claim it has, so I can’t be arsed to distro hop again.
Exactly where I’m at. I’ve had no issues with it, I have my home computer all set up and customized over the last 3 years, I’m not doing that again just to say that I’m on a different distro unless something goes very wrong.
I understand the criticisms of manjaro, and don’t recommend it to people, but it seems to be the only distro to work with my hardware/software without issue. So for now, here I am.
Manjaro is great. I keep on coming back to it time to time.
Fantastic distro.
None of the criticisms people have against it affect me.
I use Ubuntu, it’s the default for ROS. I tried debian but the instructions didn’t work instantly so I just as quickly gave up and went back to Ubuntu since I was busy. Lol.
voidlinux on my laptop (from Fedora) - why? I wanted to see what a systemd-less distro was like nowadays. I have used Linux since 1992 and Unix since 1984 so I’m used to SysVinit. What I find with voidlinux is a system I can understand easily - not that I struggle with systemd, but I felt there was just so much happening under the hood, just too clever by half. If I wanted MacOS, I’d have bought an Apple.
The packaging system on voidlinux is sooooo much faster than fedora. The really weird thing is that my battery life almost doubled. I can’t explain it except to say that the laptop is much calmer than under fedora, which seems to run the fan constantly. Same workload, CPU governers, powertop tweaks etc etc - but battery life almost doubled.
The one downside is a smaller array of packages in the repositories. But since I’m happy installing from source for those few corner cases, it’s no biggie.
I’ve left fedora on my media/file server for now as I still do some fedora packaging (mainly for sway related packages).
i distrohopped a lot until i landed on Void, then i just stayed because it does everything i need, it’s fast, understandable, easily tweakable, and rock solid
Void is just soo good.
- Runit is super simple and makes sense to me. - I get to build the distro the way I want it.
- I’ve learned a ton about the inner workings of Linux using Void for the last 3 years.
- You’re right about packages, but I’ve not had issues as I’ve found flatpacks or appimages for anything not offered.
- Xbps has spoiled me. I HATE using almost every other package manager. They’re all so slow and cumbersome.
Very well written. Makes me wanna try out void again (although I am very fine with debian)
Void here too. I was mostly Solaris & OpenBSD for many years, Void is the first linux I’m happy to run on my main machines.
I realized I was going to be comfortable with Void when I saw in the docs that to config the network you just “put the commands in rc.local”. Ha ha. Yes, that’s how you’d do it in 7th Edition Unix! Back to the basics.
What made you go away from OpenBSD? Really curious, did you actually use it as a desktop system?
Yes, although the thing on my desk is just an x-term & media player, so “desktop system” doesn’t mean that much…
Mostly video performance (1080 vid stuttered badly, while it plays fine on the same machine under linux.) & compatability. (Not that I want to run a browser on my x-term, but it would be nice to have as a fallback option. Can’t install anything recent.) Oh, and extended attributes in the filesystem. I REALLY like being able to add name=val tags to a file. It’s immensely useful. That might be my favorite feature of linux? Funny.
Also, I was in the midst of switching from Solaris to Linux on my server, so it just seemed like a good idea to run the same OS on the desktop.
Sounds like some sort of weird bug under Fedora, given the huge difference.
I consider it too from Artix. I heard it has lots of (often broken) AUR packages in the repo?
Does Gentoo count?
It’s not that unpopular. I chose it because it is very powerful. It really makes use of every Linux power there is. It makes solving problems yourself much easier, and customization is big.
Gentoo master race! :-D
I don’t know if openSUSE Tumbleweed counts as a less popular distro but it’s certainly underrated. I chose it with a roll of the dice and stayed because it’s bloody good.
My first Linux distro was SuSE 7.x, just because we had an installation box in the high school library. 8 CDs to install packages from etc. Funny stuff.
Then I played with Gentoo & Debian for a couple of years, but went back to openSuSE once I started my first real job. We had to use it because we needed a Red Hat compatible and enterprise ready Linux. And I am using openSuSE to this day if I have a choice. Everything works, if I quickly need something YaST can configure a lot of shit and is just super user-friendly.
But I recommend Leap for day-to-day work, Tumbleweed with its rolling updates keeps updating almost 24/7.
I’ve been running crunchbang++ on an older laptop since they updated to the latest Debian release.
I love how simple and speedy it is and since it’s based on Debian 12 and GTK 4 I can still run all my software super easily.
It’s also become my go-to live distro.
#! Was my go to distro for a long time. I was really happy to hear that the #!++ distro was now trucking along.
Fedora Silverblue
I use Fedora Silverblue, I don’t know if that (still) counts as “underground”-distro.
Reason I switched: I’ve been distrohopping/ desktophopping for the whole time I used Linux (~2-3 years) and always came back to Fedora. I really like it’s sane (for me) defaults.
Problem: I broke pretty much any system I installed after a few weeks.
Knowing enough to change everything, but doing exactly that without knowing exactly what I do and how to fix stuff is really bad.
Instead of fixing a problem, I just reinstalled. That took me just an hour everytime, but still is a bad practice, even when it’s quicker.Also, everytime I was happy with Gnome, KDE got a shiny new feature I just wanted to have, and I switched the Fedora spin, since switching DE on a used system feels really dirty and buggy.
The last time I broke my (Tumbleweed) install without actually doing anything I just said “Fuck it, even if I loose some freedom, I will now only use immutable systems from now on!”.
I decided for Fedora, and oh boy…
Actually, I didn’t loose much freedom or functionality at all!
(Only exception: no VPN app, I have to use the menu from Gnome; and somehow, Boxes doesn’t work atm, maybe that’s just a bug).
I’m now using it for 2 months and couldn’t be happier!!! Why?
- Atomic updates + super quick and easy rollback support (already saved my butt) by rebooting and selecting another image.
- Clear separation between “my” stuff and the OS, which is really intuitive.
- Feels clean.
- I can rebase anytime I want (switch to KDE, a WM, and so on) with one command and no residual data or bugs.
- Self maintaining with automatic updates in the background.
- Unlimited software: not an advantage of SB, but you have to use distrobox sometimes, and I would never discovered that tool without!
- AND, a project called uBlue . You can create or download custom images, like a SteamOS/ Nobara-clone, Vanilla with QOL-changes, almost all DEs (e.g. XFCE, which is unsupported by default), and so on.
I’m really in love with Silverblue, everybody should check it out!
Is it still necessary to reboot if you install/update/remove some system package?
Yes and no.
As the other commenter said, you can apply live if it has to be (but you absolutely shouldn’t).But, I never have to reboot anyway. When I install apps, I do that in containers (Toolbox, Distrobox, Flatpak) and they give me all functionality I need.
You basically only install drivers and absolutely essential stuff per OSTree and you only do that once.Updates get applied and installed in the background for me. There’s no prompt to reboot, they only get staged.
I shut down my PC every few days anyway, and when I boot, I boot into the new image.I don’t see that as a problem. Rebooting is only a matter of seconds on a NVME
I haven’t really used Tool/Distrobox so correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t they basically contain a sort of a lightweight copy of the OS (minus the kernel/and some core stuff? ), so wouldn’t you have to keep all your containers up-to-date as well, in addition to your host OS? I’m just wondering how much of a double-up/space waste there is going on with such a setup.
I’m no expert, so I can’t help you much.
The container downloaded in less than a minute in my case, and I have really really bad internet.
The containers are really minimalist (basically only a set of dependencies) and shouldn’t take much disk space.Heck, and even if they do, space is really cheap anyway.
They function sort of like how Flatpaks do. With Flatpaks, you also don’t download a whole OS, only dependencies.Maintainence wise, you’re right.
Normally, you would have to type the “distrobox-upgrade” command to update all containers.
In my case, since I use uBlue, this gets done automatically afaik.
Not strictly, no - there is an apply-live option now. Restarting is still a good idea though as with any distro.
I use NixOS for very similar reasons. And also, because I like my full configuration in one place.
Yeah, I fully get why people like Nix.
I fully respect it when people want a “next-gen-Arch” with the DIY-aspect of building their own OS. At least, that’s my impression on it.
For me personally, it sounds like too much work. I’m not advanced enough and want something hassle free that “just works”.
But especially for professional developers (reproducibility) and Linux enthusiasts, it sounds like a dream!
As a fellow Silverblue user, I really wanted to like NixOS. I was surprised to discover it did not support declarative management of flatpak workflows, which pretty much eliminated it as an option for me. That, combined with its highly unconventional filesystem hierarchy, and its cumbersome configuration and project documentation was enough to send me back to Silverblue.
Don’t get me wrong, NixOS is very powerful and an excellent solution for some use cases; it just wasn’t right for mine.
I don’t know if I’d count it because I’d consider it part of Fedora, but +1 for Silverblue. I’ve been playing with it for 3 years and daily driving it for the past year - it’s been great seeing it improve during that time and feels like the future.
I used to have Silverblue for my work laptop OS, I broke it quite fast, multiple times, got annoyed, switched to NixOS like on my home setup. I am the person that tinkers with everything, and NixOS just wont die. I need to install it only once per computer’s drive lifetime.
Is Gentoo lacking enough popularity?
If so, I use it because it offers unrivalled flexibility, even compared to Arch, portage, which is an epic package manager, a dedicated security team, reasonably large community and developer base, source-based package distribution and fast package updates, which often outpace even arch.
I like it because -Ofast -flto go brrr
I’ve been using Source Mage for about a year now! It’s a source-based distro like Gentoo. It’s magic themed, so instead of repositories we have grimoires, and instead of packages we have spells :) my main reason for using it is because I tried it out a few years ago and the magic themed intrigued me. Eventually I decided to write some of my own spells (some important programs were missing that I wanted) I found them a lot easier to parse than gentoos ebuilds personally. But after I’d been sending PRs for a few months, I got added to the team as an official maintainer!
it’s a really fun distro to use, if not a bit hard to get up-and-running (only tarball-based install, we used to have ISOs but they’re out of date for now) I’ve put a lot of work into getting it how i like it, i enjoy the tinkering aspect of it :) its fun
OpenMandriva. It is the official successor from Mandrake/Mandriva and has a rolling release edition called ROME which has brand new software. It is independent too and does not belong to a corporation.
We are looking for developers, packagers, translators, supporters. If you are interested come and join our Matrix chat :)
Does it still use RPM packages?
DNF and RPM, yes. You can usw zypper too. There is also a znver1 Architecture Edition optimized for the Zen/Ryzen CPU architecture.
Does using Alpine for your desktop count? I don’t do any server or container stuff, it works like any other distro and the packages are quite up-to-date so…
I’d be more interested in what obscure text editors, window managers, etc people were using regardless of distro. Distro in my mind is about software release and install philosophy, any distribution that comes with a lot of preinstalled software is generally built on the back of a more skeletal distribution, and is interesting mostly for what software choices it makes.
You do have a point but distributions are not just about the package software. They are also about user experiences, workflows and aesthetics.
Another for crunchbang++ a really good minimal Debian distro with no desktop environment, just Openbox window manager. Have been using since it picked up from the original crunchbang. Have built my own kinda desktop environment how I like it and I will never change.
Fedora Kinoite. Some time in the future this will only be Fedora KDE though. The future of well structured, versioned and controlled Linux Distros. So easy to service, I would never want to maintain a fleet of PCs with anything else
Open Media Vault (OMV)! I was given a used QNAP NAS, but didn’t want to use their OS. TrueNAS has higher system requirements than what I had and Unraid is paid. OMV has been a dream! Having the flexibility of a full Debian OS, but also with the prepackaged software I need, it amazing. Plus, I love the web UI. At the time of writing this, I have 12TB of usable space with 3 months of uninterrupted uptime.
Alpine Linux. I started using it to dogfood my packages I was maintaining for postmarketOS but I’ve come to really like it. It does help that I can just fix packaging problems (or just missing packages entirely) myself.
Previously I used Gentoo which I still have a place in my heart for. If I’d ever move to anything else it would probably be Gentoo again.