5mo ago

Sell us on your favorite exotic/niche distro

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!

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108 comments

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.
- 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)
  
  If that is what you are looking for, try Chimera Linux. It was created by a Void maintainer.
  https://chimera-linux.org/
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
  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.

108 comments