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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.

193 comments
  • I switched to NixOS almost two years ago, and it's really nice being able to define my whole system in a single set of config files. If my hard drive dies or I switch computers, I can just reinstall NixOS using my config files and everything will be set up the exact same way. It's extremely solid and I don't need to baby my system because if it breaks I can just reinstall everything back to normal.

    And I can share parts of the config between devices, so when I change my Neovim or VSCodium configs using Home-Manager it gets synced to my other devices, as well as being saved as part of my NixOS config files.

    • +1 for Nix. In my case I switched from Opensuse Tumbleweed to NixOS about a year ago. Before NixOS I had spent years distro-hopping fairly regularly just in an effort to find something that was atleast moderately simple to setup/troubleshoot, (I'm no developer, and my Linux technical expertise really only covers the basics) and that would be resilient to the careless tinkering I tended to do in general.

      Using NixOS on a daily basis has been a complete pleasure. After experiencing the sane-ness of a declarative system I'll never go back. As of late, NixOS seems to have been growing steadily in popularity, although most of its userbase are experienced developers, businesses, and almost no Linux beginners. This is understandable given its current state and reputation as an advanced distro, but I am of the opinion that--if a GUI software store for nixpkgs and a GUI program for editing the system's configuration options were developed--NixOS could quickly become one of the most desktop user-friendly distros available given its underlying immutability and unrivalled stability in general.

    • Im still toying with the idea of nix (using Fedora rn) but I don’t code at all rn and don’t need to rebuild my system all the time so I think it’s pointless

  • I use Void Linux on my home servers and I really like it. Clean , small, and stable.

  • 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.

  • I've used alpine a lot on my laptop, though it's currently been relegated to my home server only. It's a great distro, if you can live with it's limitations. Stable, fast, compact and has a great package manage.

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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...

  • 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 find in the terminal always gets me what I need.

  • Opensuse micro, I also run Nixos but opensuse does a really good job at using containers easily with distrobox

    • Talking about unpopular, I have just created fork of the project Greybeard (MicroOS+Sway) called “Moldavite” (meteorite induced explosion near Nürnberg caused a lot of gems falling on the ground in Bohemia, if it is not a symbol of the cooperation inside of SUSE, then I don’t know what would be ;)). The main project site is https://sr.ht/~mcepl/moldavite/ and OBS project is https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:mcepl:moldavite . Whereas, as I understand it, Greybeard is at least for the moment more or less on the back burner, I hope to continue to work on this.

  • Can't believe I'm the first one to come in with Guix System!! I like it because, just like NixOS, it's immutable, declarative and pure. I also dig that everything is written in Guile Scheme, a full-fat programming language. You don't need to know the language exhaustively to get started. There's some wonderful folks in the community though it's a bit spread out since not everyone wants to chat on IRC and mailing lists.

    The Guix sublemmy.

193 comments