1y ago

Who here uses a less popular Linux distribution? What made you choose it?

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.

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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
- 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.
- 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.
- Very well written. Makes me wanna try out void again (although I am very fine with debian)
- 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.
- 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?

193 comments