Linux @lemmy.ml

1mo ago

What's the most obscure distro you can think of

196 comments

Rebecca Black OS.
It is the only Linux distro to date built around Weston, using Wayland's full capability:

It doesn't include any Rebecca Black theming or is related to her in any way.
It's just called that cause the dev is a fan of hers.
- From the name, I expected a Hannah Montana Linux type distro.
- Tell me if has a special "Friday" desktop at least.
- I’m pretty sure that screenshot is Wayfire, not Weston.
  
  right. This is Weston (same distro):

Hannah Monata Linux and Red Star from North Korea.
- Woah woah woah, there's a North Korean Linux distribution?
  
  Yes, of course. They can hardly use an OS that phones home to the US.
- A meme Linux is the "most obscure" you can think of?
  
  Actually the Red Star developers seem very serious

DSLinux
- Oh jeez. I forgot about that. I had that running on my DS back in the day from a GBA flashcart with a big-ass CompactFlash card sticking out the bottom. Good times.
- Wow, I just realized it was the first Linux I ever used
- Yes, particularly the variant distributed on a business-card sized CD rom. To be carried in your wallet for emergency use.

The first one that came to mind was fli4l (Floppy ISDN for Linux). Originally a distro of German origin that fit on a single floppy disk to turn a 386 or 486 PC into a router for ISDN connections. Last I looked it's still actively worked on.
There are probably tons of more obsuce ones. But this is one I actually used.
- I've recently gone through my dad's floppies and found one with fli4l.

Check out the random button on Distrowatch (distrowatch.com/random.php) - it's like a Linux lottery, but you always win something weird!
- Let's make this a game. Click on it, then you have to install that on bare metal and daily it for a month.
  
  Got RISC OS
  mom, I'm scared
  
  Oh god, I got Murena (LineageOS distro). How does one install that onto a ThinkPad T480..
  
  I got Plamo Linux
  
  Ha I got tuxedo OS, hopefully thats not too niche
  
  I got portuex, never used Slackware but seems serviceable, I’m just scared of nVidia driver setup haha
  
  Got PakOS, but since I'm not Pakistani I'm not sure how useful it would be
  
  Rockstor here. Which is interesting bc I’ve been thinking about setting up another NAS.
  
  I got Linux Lite, which I've tried in the past.
  
  I got archcraft.
  Lucky me. It's also from India which is fun.
  https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=archcraft
- Gentoo. Not that bad for a random pick.
- This distro’s default background isn’t a knockoff of any particular popular non-*nix proprietary operating system’s default background:

Smoothwall. I used to run it a lot back in the early 2000s for personal use and even helped set up a couple small businesses with it but I don't hear of anyone else using it these days, people seem to love openwrt and pfsense more.
It was great for just taking any old x86 machine and making a powerful, fully featured firewall/router out of it, including a VPN server, all through a web interface. Nowadays that's boring shit but in 2002 it was pretty cool.
- Good old Smoothie. Served me well back then. I think it went commercial at some point.
- We had this as the firewall in our school! I remember bypassing it in so many ways with Google DNS and whatnot.
- Any reason to use this over opnsense?

elive
you think a distribution that automatically includes all the proprietary stuff that we use baked into the distro would be more popular since it makes linux ready to go for most people; but it still gets fewer than 300 clicks per month.
- automatically includes all the proprietary stuff
  Jail.
  
  They've been able to figure it out so far
- Doesn't Pop!OS do that already?
  
  And Ubuntu, no? Wasn’t that the big selling point of Ubuntu back in the day?
  
  Yes, as far as they're allowed to in this country
- I feel like the Enlightenment desktop environment isn't to everyone's taste. It's definitely got some idiosyncratic design choices...
- Its unpopularity may be related to that it asks money or a positive review in a blog to even try. Used to be so a few years ago.
  
  i wasn't aware that it had changed like that; i stopped using it when i switch to linux laptops from linux companies like tuxedo and system76
- First I'm hearing of it. I'ma try it out
  
  It made me lazy since they got everything to work out of the box. Lol
  
  This. People always go "It looks like MacOS" but to me esp the icons just look like outdated Linux Mint/Cinnamon from 15 years ago. If people like ot that's cool, it's just not for me.

gobolinux
it's main feature is that it completely redefines the system's root directory structure. the only reason i even know it exists is because i'm friends with one of the creators
- Gobo Linux has to have been the distro I was looking forward to most too. I really hope it picks up because it's design philosophies. Absolutely phenomenal.
  
  You may wish to look into NixOS or GNU Guix as taking the same ideas to the logical conclusion, or stal/ix which aspires to take a more traditional approach and in that way is perhaps closer to Gobo. All three are very much alive and actively maintained, even thriving by some metrics.
- I hear you saying "not compatible with FHS" but then extra words I no longer need to hear.

hyperbola
they have a wiki with insane nonsens about why they don't package certain things. Example:
pam
Package has different security-issues and is not oriented on the way of technical emancipation as Hyperbola is trying to adapt lightweight implementations.
https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en%3Aphilosophy%3Aincompatible_packages
- Wait... they're militant enough about Free Software to refuse to package anything even slightly non-Free, but their "final goal" is to switch the kernel to BSD (i.e. away from copyleft)? WTF?
  
  but their “final goal” is to switch the kernel to BSD (i.e. away from copyleft)?
  HyperbolaBSD is a hard fork, that relicenses the OpenBSD kernel as GPL (as permitted by permissive licenses.)
  HyperbolaBSD has already dug into the OpenBSD source tree and discovered numerous licensing issues.
  https://git.hyperbola.info:50100/~team/documentation/todo.git/tree/openbsd_kernel-file-list-with-license-issues.md
  HyperbolaBSD will be a truly libre distro that takes advantage of copyleft, while moving away from the major issues Linux is stepping into too.
  
  It's an ancient divide in parts of the FOSS community that believes copyleft licenses are not "free" because they force you to license contributions under the same license.
- Wow, you weren’t kidding.
- Why did I read all of this.
- Certain things? Fucking luddite idiots don't package 99.9% of software.
  AIX Unix from the 1980s is literally more useful than that heap of garbage
  
  Why so much rage?
  Yes, Hyperbola is very ideological and super strict, but it was always meant to be that way - to provide a system that works in some way and at the same time is as ethical and "clean" as possible. Some people value it over anything, and for them, Hyperbola is a good pick.
- was that translated into english from another language?
  I love how they blended FAQ with meth-induced psychosis rambling.
  I've gotta give them kudos for sticking to their very strict values, but holy hell is this hard to parse

Meego, a combination of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo. It only ever shipped on one device, the Nokia N9.
- I much enjoyed it back in the day. Nokia even had their own app store for it and gave a nice financial incentive for the first hundred or thousand apps.
  I feel Jolla & SailfishOS is the spiritual successor.

Have you ever heard of arch? That's what I use by the way
- Hardly obscure.

Suicide linux. Nobody can run it for more than a day
Edit: i just searched "suicide linux" to see if it still exists and one of the top results was ian murdock's wiki page, :(
- “suicide linux”
  Looked it up with quotes and the first update in the first search result:
  Update 2011-12-26
  Someone has turned Suicide Linux into a genuine Debian package. Good show!
  :(

KISS
it's just a single bash script and a repository containing package definitions to compile them from source.
Basically LFS on drugs.
- Interesting, was searching for anybody who mentioned LFS/Linux From Scratch leading here. Doesn't seem active anymore though.

Rarely hear about DSL anymore, http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
- It was dead for a long time, was replaced in spirit by Puppy Linux, and only recently was reactivated.
- That was my go-to long ago

Take your pick from the Linux family tree
- I don't see nixos in there!
- Man artix isnt there
- Should hyprland be in the table or are Wayland Compositors ignored? 👀
  
  it's only distros

most obscure and to me coolest but unfortunately not very active https://sourcemage.org/
- I remember reading about it like 10 years ago along with LunarLinux (e: and sorcerer) as was curious about other source based linux distros. I thought both were dead, glad that at least sourcemage is still alive
  
  its always a bit hard to tell with source distros.
- i was gonna say source mage! so i guess it's not that obscure, if two of us thought to mention it.
  
  I think its obscure but some wierdos geek out on it :)

Bohdi linux. smoll and beautiful. Used to run it on my eeepc 701
- That's a blast from the past! I used to run #! On my 701...
- Bohdi is pretty nice. Needed a Linux test device at a job a few years ago and for some reason this was one of the only ones approved. Was pretty solid for the few times I needed to use it.

I'm gonna go with Tom's Root Boot. Or maybe the father of all live distros, Knoppix.
- Didn't think Knoppix was obscure, but that was my gateway to Linux first on all my personal PCs.
  I guess the years have passed it by.
  
  Don't think so either but it has withered away.

Well I don’t hear much about Gentoo, Damn Small, Puppy or Knoppix anymore. Wonder if they still exist.
I haven’t done much disto hopping since I settled on Ubuntu around ‘08 and then on NixOS last year. I like my systems working when I need them and waiting around for a new install to finish is boring to me.
- Gentoo still exists 🙂
- Gentoo still exists. Damn Small was dead for a decade but has risen again recently. Puppy is alive and well. Knoppix is still alive, but the last downloadable release is almost 4 years old.
- I use puppy from time to time. Works well.
- I think NixOS has taken a bit of Gentoo's mindshare. They solve similar problems with very different approaches.
  
  How so? When I switched to NixOs I was looking for system stability over time. That’s not really something I associate with Gentoo, at least not on a desktop system.
- Gentoo's forums are quite active and it's one of my daily drivers. I think the others kinda faded away.
- DSL is basically an Antix spin now ( which is itself basically just Debian ).

Limiting to those I have used daily and treated as Linux (used the terminal for example) probably Maemo. I used to carry my Nokia Internet Tablet 770, and then my N800 everywhere with me.
Maemo is also an ancestor of both Tizen and Sailfish OS
- My first smart phone was a Nokia N9. I loved Meego which was between Maemo and sailfish. I hatred Microsoft before that, but them killing Nokia made my hate burn even brighter.

Jarro Negro. Made by Mexican students. And as far as I know, it's independent, not based on another distro.

Yellow Dog
I actually ran this on a PPC Mac back in the day
- That was the my first distro. Getting it to run off a FireWire drive was an interesting introduction to Linux.
  Fun fact: yum stands for Yellow dog Update Manager. I know it's been replaced by dnf but I still think that's cool.
- Someone gave me a PowerMac and of course I had to try to run Linux. It was an interesting experience, it would boot to MacOS and then run the Yellow Dog bootloader. Couldn't get it to boot directly. That little experiment showed me how tightly Apple controlled what would run on Apple machines back then.
- I ran yellowdog on my PS3 until they took away the otherOS

Red star OS
- Everybody knows glorious leader’s operating system. 😉

Sabayon Linux. I'm not sure if it's still releasing updates, the main website is dead. It was based on Gentoo and later funtoo, but had a package manager of precompiled binaries. You could still use emerge if you wanted to. Definitely a weird and interesting distro
Blend OS is trying to do the declarative nixos thing but with an arch base. That's pretty cool.
ClearOS was Intel's attempt at an immutable os. From what I remember it was really fast.
Edit: actually it clear Linux not clearOS. Edit: also clear Linux is stateless. I don't know, there's a lot about it I don't understand

The old PearOS(which looked like a meme-ish knockoff MacOS), UwUntu and Nyarch

There was a bunch of weird rebadged Ubuntu derivatives back in the day.
Ubuntu satanic edition. https://archiveos.org/ubuntu-satanic/
Ubuntu Christian edition. https://archiveos.org/ubuntu-christian/
Hannah Montana Linux https://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/

Obscure as in "only for a very specific purpose and nothing else"?...
Well, there is the Mircrosoft linux distro for their azure cloud
I guess DD-WRT as distro for router is also kind of obscure. Or the more general openWRT for embedded systems.

I imagine there was a time when this wasn't obscure, but I'm guessing people today don't remember Caldera OpenLinux. That was the first Linux distro I installed/used. A guy from church gave his copy.
Caldera eventually became SCO. But I'm pretty sure I was using Caldera OpenLinux before the whole Novell patent suit thing.
- Speaking of old, dead distros, my first Linux -- sort of -- was TurboLinux 6.0. I say "sort of" because I never successfully got it to install and run. : (
- I never used Caldera Linux but I did use their DOS for a while.

Jolicloud. I ran it on an old low-spec netbook in 2013ish, basically a ChromeOS before Chromebooks were a thing. It was discontinued in 2016 but great for the hardware while it lasted.

There was this distro that stuffs everything of a package in one folder, instead of /usr/lib & co. What was it called again?
- Gobolinux?
  
  Right, thanks!
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoboLinux

I haven't tried all that many distros, but I'd say Puppy Linux. Pretty neat that it loads into RAM from USB and has fairly light memory requirements, but it does feel a little on the clunky side as far as configuration and stuff goes.

Linux STD! Waaaay before skiddos had backtrack or kali
- That's an...interesting name.
  
  Security Tools Distribution :)
  https://s-t-d.org/
  
  C programming language also uses STD in a lot of the standard library names (short for standard). I wonder if the creators of both didn't realize when they named it or did and thought it was funny. My bet is the latter.

If being usable is a metric, Slackware
- Hardly obscure.
  
  How many ppl do you see rocking Slackware nowadays?

2 days ago my friend found an old SATA hard drive and gave it to me to check what's on it, and me, not having a disk station or anything, and against all better judgment, I just swapped the disk in my laptop for my friend's, and instead of my laptop being fried it turned out the disk was running something called Crunchbang Linux
- I loved that distro. Unfortunately it got discontinued at some point.
  
  Crunchbang++ is alive and we're using it
  
  That's what bunsenlabs is for.
  
  Yup, in 2015, more or less, from what I remember reading the Wikipedia page. Got superceded by bunsenlabs, like notthebees said.

I see no one has mentioned Bedrock Linux yet. Not sure though how others would rate its 'obscurity' though. It's definitely a standout among distros.

Probably KaOS. It puts a strong focus on KDE and Qt.
As in, it doesn't package programs using different GUI toolkits, aside from the most popular, like Firefox and GIMP. When I tried it a few years ago, you also had to enable a separate repo to get access to these.
- Reminds me of chakra linux. Same principals, except built on top of Arch base, and the other toolkit apps were distributed as self contained image files.
  
  Right. Cjakra and KaOS were two I was following the developments as a KDE lover. Too bad none got popular enough, and Chakra even died :(

Sabayon Linux
I used it for a few years, great distro. I think it's dead now. It was based on Gentoo but with thoughtful defaults and a very good binary package manager.
also Funtoo Linux, but i never really used it
- I used Sabayon for a bit too. It was basically "Gentoo made easy" with a simpler installer and as you said a binarypackage manager rather than compiling packages from source. It's wasn't 100% completely dead after dropping the Sabayon branding, it morphed into Mocaccino Linux, but when they did so they re-based it on Funtoo, which is also now dead.

United Linux - the famous Red Hat Enterprise Linux killer!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Linux
- I worked on that.
  It was SuSe with any branding or tools ripped out, the carcass kicked over the fence for the rest of us to try to make an OS out of.
  It had no chance. What we got was a bleeding corpse after SuSE had a sellable product to compete against us all with.
  It killed turbo, it killed conectiva and it killed openlinux. Horrible thing.

I created a distro once for class that just had diaspora installed on a live CD. It was only used for demos a looong time ago. DiasporaTest.

dyne:bolic - specifically 1.4.1
Had support for the original Xbox, a multimedia editing / streaming focussed OS. I'd never run it on mine - just messed with xdsl before going back to XBMC.

Not really a Linux distro, but TempleOS

No one mentioned Bunsenlabs or Crunchbang Linux here, but they aren't really that obscure.
- Archbang maybe more?
- Not really obscure

Clear Linux.

No one ever mentions Crux Linux

Maybe not some obscure ones, but here are some lesser known ones:
Talos Linux. It's an immutable operating system designed specifically to deploy kubernetes.
OpenSuse Harvester Think Proxmox, but instead of VM's and LXC containers, it's VM's and Kubernetes.
XCP-NG is a RHEL based distro designed for managing Linux virtual machines using the xen hypervisor, as opposed to KVM. Think Proxmox, but RHEL and Xen (also no LXC). However, it does not come with a web ui out of the box, you have to deploy it yourself. Technically, XCP is a Xen distribution, since Xen is a kernel with nothing but a hypervisor that runs under the main distro, but the primary management virtual machine is RHEL based, and uses Linux.
Speaking of Proxmox, Proxmox is technically a Linux distro.
SnowflakeOS is a project that aims to bring a GUI focused experience to NixOS.
TurnkeyLinux (site is loading very, very slowly for me right now) is not a single distribution, but rather a set of debian based distributions that are designed to be turnkey appliance virtual machines that contain and host a specific app. To deploy the app, all you have to do is set up the virtual machine.
Now, here are some not-linux, but interesting distros:
SmartOS. They ported KVM to unix, and also can use Linux syscall translation (similar to wine) to run apps in containers as well. There is also Bhyve. It's a very interesting hypervisor platform.
OmniOS is similar. Bhyve, KVM, and Linux syscall translation in containers.

SLiTaz
It's an obscure originally live usage oriented distro that you could also install. It was the first *Nix I ever used.
- Not so obscure, just 50mb and very functional, in between tiny core and puppy.
- it was for a time a distro i was really big on on account of how small it could be on live media. absolutely fantastic for very old pcs and netbooks, too

https://www.qubes-os.org/statistics/
- Not really, at least in sites like gutefrage (german site where the biggest dumbasses of the world unite) There were a lot of questions about them trying to use it as their first Linux distro because they magically care about privacy

I had no idea mageia existed until I met a dude who had it

I used to run Reborn OS at around 2017 for a few years. It used Cnchi installer, just like Antergos, and when Antergos died, I saw Reborn as its successor. But the title went to Endeavour (why?) and Reborn never got popularity.

Hikarunix

Chimera Linux
- I had not noticed that KDE is available for Chimera now. Very cool.
  
  Nice

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