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.
My fav obscure distros are: 1. Sparky Linux, Debian based simple stable system. It has many flavours with a lot of desktops to choose from. Also has stable and semi-roling iso. Now I never installed Debian itself, so can’t compare sparky with Debian. But it is very much better than any other distro I used. I don’t know why it is not popular. 2. Reborn OS. I used to love it when running. Arch based lovely project. This is the very much successor of Antergos.
Spiral, yes I had a glance on it. It seemed the Gecko of Debian, as expected. I did not find it too different than sparky, so I did not embrace it well. Not planning to see again for now either. If I get a chance to try a new distro, I’d install Void or NixOS. For now I am happy with Arch or ubuntu family.
Not my daily but I carry around a usb with slax linux as a portable work environment as well as a recovery tool.
I just installed Linux two nights ago! I tried Mint but it wouldn’t install because of RST being enabled. I didn’t feel comfortable trying to disable it, I was afraid I’d break something. I installed OpenSuse Tumbleweed and it went smoothly! It’s been fun being on linux. I customized the theme, downloaded some updates and got Steam working. My only issue is booting into it. I have to boot into windows, restart holding shift and then boot to USB SSD from there. My next goal is getting a boot screen that will allow me to pick Linux or Windows drive.
Good for you. Happy to see a new user. Good luck on your Linux journey. And remember if someone recommends you remove the french language pack don’t do it.
Sounds like a bios issue, you need to set USB devices to have a higher priority than your internals,. You can probably access your bios settings by pressing something like F10-12 on boot, usually there is a splash screen that tells you what to press.
Do you have fast boot enabled in Windows? Every Linux distribution I’ve tried installs grub or systemd-boot by default, so not having a boot selection screen is odd.
Tumbleweed is great for ancient devices, too. Even Arch doesn’t officially support 32bit systems anymore, but OpenSuse still does
I’m curious if anyone dailies Alpine for desktop use. (I don’t.)
I have before. I liked it broadly, but could not fix issues with artifacting while playing video in Firefox. It’s a small issue, but enough to make me go back to Arch and/or Debian.
Bodhi Linux. I have an old hp desktop and it only has 2 gb of ram and 2 cores. I wanted a real lightweight distro and settled on arch linux but one day i tripped and knocked the tower over. When i booted it back up i had the infamous blinking underscore. I tried reinstalling arch multiple times and it kept failing, so i tried a lightweight arch based distro called archbang, same issue. I tried manjaro same issue.
At this point i wanted to try something not arch based but wanted something that came with minimal preinstalled programs like arch. Research led me to bodhi which is a light weight distro based on ubuntu. Installed with no issues and been using it ever since, about 3 years now.
Don’t know what i damaged on the motherboard but it must have been something integral to arch based distros, but i’m kind of glad it happened because i love bodhi now
It has allowed an ancient computer to do so much. I’ve run matrix servers and web servers, written my own webapps to run on it and so much more
TuxedoOS
It’s just so nice with my tuxedo laptop and made me love Plasma.
Same here. I used Fedora with gnome before, but this summer I bought a Tuxedo laptop and saw that they maintain their own distro. And as I have been happy with fedora and gnome for way too long, it was time for a switch.
Same here. Have been a Mint user for more than 10 years and switched recently with the new laptop. I like it a lot, really stable system.
Idk if this counts but I found my home in a less popular distro, kind of.
I’d tried a few back in the early '00s. While my friends were experimenting with drugs and shit, I was experimenting with Linux distros and virtual machines lmao.
I started with Suse. I’m not too sure what made me switch or where I heard about this one from, but I eventually moved on to Mepis. It was originally rooted in Debian, then moved to Ubuntu before being discontinued.
My good friend at the time was big into Debian. I felt like pure Debian was too much for me to take on as a noob, but I wanted to be able to reach out to him for help now and again when I needed it. Switching to Mepis was pretty much a no-brainer. It was easy enough to get accustomed with. I was still mostly a Windows user, so the transition to KDE was simple. I’m old enough to remember the days of DOS so bumping around a CLI was also not that big of a deal.
The hardest parts were understanding how to install software (the concept of the repository was new to me), and the basic terminal commands. From there I was mostly good.
I remember when Mepis moved to Ubuntu, there were a lot of groans - myself included. But ironically, I’ve been a pretty much dedicated to Ubuntu for my linux stuff for ages. These days I’m running it with i3wm and I have no major complaints.
To be completely honest, though, I still don’t really fully understand the standard file layout… I get it conceptually, but then stuff gets so fragmented - binary files in usr instead of bin, how to track where installed stuff ends up, etc.
I’ll figure it out one day, when I really need to… But that time hasn’t come yet. A quick
findin the terminal always gets me what I need.I was on drugs (lots of drugs) AND slackware in the late 90s and early 00s!
Artix Linux (w/ Runit) & Void Linux. Interestingly although I started using Linux from Jan 2022, I have used these 2 distros 95% of that time. The rest 5% being Endeavour OS on which I started my journey into Linux.
Due to older hardware and my natural curiousity to learn more about the System. I switched to Artix very early into Linux. The Runit Init system and the fact I chose a base iso (i.e. everything in the system apart from the Core was hand picked and configured by me) made my PC very fast and flexible. I found it quite inconvenient to work and learn w/ and in EndeavourOS. Artix provided me that canvas and it helped me a lot. One possible future con might be that I find it a bit more effort to troubleshoot more popular Distros, in case I need to, because I rarely use non-tui or non-cli programs and I have never worked on Systemd. Fortunately there are always the Arch Wiki or the Program Manuals.
I switched to Void Linux from Artix because Artx, being Arch-Based was a bit unstable whereas Void is a stable-rolling release, sort of like a middle ground between Debian and Arch and so it fits my dynamic. Otherwise it is as good as Artix in other cases.
I use MX, formerly know as Mepis. Super stable and kept up to date. It used to be Debian based and they still use some Debian repos but it’s largely independent now
Not sure if KDE Neon counts as a “less popular” distro, but it’s what I’ve been using for around the last half year. I appreciate the stability of being based on the latest Ubuntu LTS along with the package availability of a Ubuntu-based distro, while also getting all the latest updates to KDE software and enough updates to other software to keep me satisfied. Snap is installed but not default (my system uses very minimal numbers of snaps as a result) and Flatpak is installed so I can also easily install software that’s not in the Ubuntu LTS repos as a binary.
I used KDE Neon for a while for a similar reason. I just needed a home to think and watch for a few months while the Snap thing played out. It works and you get fresh KDE, which just so happens to be my favorite DE!
Idk how popular it is, especially since it’s Arch based, but went with EndeavorOS after not running Linux for a few years – work machine mandated Windows and gaming compatibility was kinda sketch at the time. Heard Gaming compatibility had improved (it has) so wanted to try it out again.
Not afraid of troubleshooting issues I cause, and bleeding edge shenanigans, but a proper Arch install from scratch was still a bit daunting. So it seemed like a good middle ground, and access to the AUR sounded nice.
Been running it with KDE Plasma for a while, been going great! Some issues with Nvidia drivers here and there but hopefully going to upgrade and swap to AMD at some point.
Same similar story but was running Manjaro beforehand. Liking EndeavourOS so for as well!
Did have a Grub issue but after a day of what I call “constructive troubleshooting / learning”, was able to rescue my installation.
Just got to have the drive to learn sometimes
Yeah I had one of those moments when an update totally broke stuff. Like, couldn’t boot at all. Had to boot into the USB and chroot to reinstall some drivers. Was a fun learning experience lol
May I ask what spurred you to jump from Manjaro to EndeavourOS?
No particular reason, honestly. Ran Manjaro for ~4 years and just wanted something new. A lot of trial and error installing and just wanted a fresh start with the additional knowledge that I had gained over the years.
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).
Void and Alpine are great for their simplicity and speed, I’m using those two exclusively outside of work.
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.
Very well written. Makes me wanna try out void again (although I am very fine with debian)
Sounds like some sort of weird bug under Fedora, given the huge difference.
I used Void with xfce for a year and I feel like it was the best “new” distro I’ve ever had my hands on. It was clean, efficient and I loved initd and xbps.
I consider it too from Artix. I heard it has lots of (often broken) AUR packages in the repo?
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.
I LOVE void, while I did need to do a bit more research at times, I felt like it taught me more about how an OS functions. The first time I made my own unit script was also super satisfying.
I’m on Garuda, primarily becausei built a new machine with a (then) bleeding edge GPU, so I needed something rolling release that could make use of it. I tried a few others, including Endeavour and Nobara, but Garuda got me farthest along on its own.
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.
NixOS
