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 🙂
Take your pick from the Linux family tree
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.Hannah Monata Linux and Red Star from North Korea.
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.
I had no idea mageia existed until I met a dude who had it
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 I know it’s been replaced by dnf but I still think that’s cool.
Rarely hear about DSL anymore, http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
Linux STD! Waaaay before skiddos had backtrack or kali
That’s an…interesting name.
Security Tools Distribution :)
The old PearOS(which looked like a meme-ish knockoff MacOS), UwUntu and Nyarch
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.
FreeBSD Just kidding
No one ever mentions Crux Linux
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
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.