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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I like TailsOS, which is an amnesiac system that runs entirely in RAM and boots from a USB hard drive. The goal for the operating system is to be a safe operating system for people who are in compromising situations - from international reporters to survivors of domestic abuse, it is a way to highly reduce your ability to be tracked.
The downsides of amnesiac systems are obvious - without enabling the setting for permanent storage, effectively everything you do on the OS is lost every time. And if you do enable persistent memory, well, that’s not exactly entirely safe if you are caught out.
What I like the OS for though is as someone who is not compromised or in a situation where I need these privacies (despite appreciating them), my usage of it makes it safer for others who are using it (since internet is through Tor), and I feel more comfortable using computers in the wild when needed, since I’m not logging in on the public operating system that will be used by everybody else.
Many people give these projects flack or diminish their values as a “daily driver”, but I think often times forget the important aspects of them. They may not be a daily driver for you or I by nature of our needs, but they are certainly important daily drivers for others. In addition to that, supporting a project that helps people in compromised situations and becoming another node to bounce off of (again, Tor, not inherent to the usage of this OS) is a nice additional benefit.
Tl;DR amnesiac operating systems because they’re simple, straightforward, and make you feel more like whitehat hackerman when you’ve done nothing at all.
Haha nice try. If everyone starts liking it then it won’t be niche anymore. So I won’t share it! /s
It’s Puppy Linux, isn’t it?
Nah I just posted this as a joke. I am on Fedora + KDE. Mainstream and boring as they come. Rock solid and stable though.
I was just making a joke about your username being a distro tbh
Oops, self swoosh to me.
Not so much a niche distribution, but I would like to recommend Chimera Linux, because it combines musl with BSD userland.
Not to be confused with ChimeraOS
Same as a Chimera Linux user I’d definitely recommend trying it. I was a Void user beforee and was Swithering whether to go full BSD when I stumbled across Chimera which gives me the best of both worlds.
I finally got fed up with my Windows machine and upon seeing symptoms of motherboard failure, I’ve ordered all the parts for a new rig and intend on installing Linux as my primary OS.
Haven’t decided on a distro yet. I’m a DevOps engineer with a few passion projects, so I plan on setting up a couple of kubernetes clusters where I can play. I do all the usual things (word processing, gaming, web browsing, multimedia, etc), plus some AI stuff (stable diffusion, local LLMs, OpenCV). Ideally don’t want to have to fuss with drivers too much, but I don’t mind getting my hands dirty every now and then.
Is Chimera the kind of distro I should be looking at, or should I pick something else for my first go at full-time Linux?
Chimera Linux is awesome but it is still in Alpha. I would not recommend it as a first distro at this point unless you have a very tinker personality. It is high quality but lacks polish. For example, it does not have a real installer yet ( more of a set of instructions ).
My reason for not using Chimera as a daily driver is because I am a developer and there are still packages I need, that require libc still. My only advice would be to look through their packages and make sure you can find the things you need in there. If not, you need to research if the package you want is available through some other source and can run with musl instead of libc.
Makes sense. Thanks for the info!
Sound reasoning. That said…
Have you considered using Distrobox?
You can use Distrobox to crate a dev environment on Chimera based on a glibc distro ( like Arch for example with its 80,000 up-to-date packages ).
This has the added bonus of keeping your dev environment somewhat apart from your main install. If you ever want a clean slate ( too many junk packages accumulated or you mess something up ), you can refresh your dev environment without impacting your main desktop. You can also have multiple dev environments for different projects.
Small nit-pick: MUSL is libc too. I think you meant to say Glibc ( the GNU libc implementation ).
That is a case I had not considered, thank you for the suggestion, and thank you for the correction concerning glibc.
I’m not sure if it’s niche but openSUSE Tumbleweed isn’t as popular as it deserves to be. If you are looking for more niche, back in my distro hopping days I enjoyed Kaos and Solus
More niche? Opensuse Kalpa.
I started running it and their are some pains like figuring out which layer to install tablet driver software, undervolting software, and kde connect. Seam flatpak still sucks dick and the tray icon for it doesn’t work at all and it needs a ton of modifications to get things to where the native steam runtime just works, but still a fun experiment.
Dietpi for me. It is meant for sbc’s, but it can (also) be installed on x86 pcs. And its focus is on minimalism – as much as possible.
I love dietpi. The entire software install is a huge 1000 line bash script. If that sounds horrific, it’s genuinely well structured and readable
It does sound horrific, but mostly because it would be poorly executed by many devs.
Well, and the seeming trend towards install commands that look like curl $file.sh | sh
But if they’re not actively encouraging that, I see no issue with a well maintained install tool, created from well maintained toolsets that work on essentially any platform.
Never heard of sh, I use bash and I call it as /usr/bin/bash (for security).
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)
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.
If that is what you are looking for, try Chimera Linux. It was created by a Void maintainer.
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.
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.
Is Bazzite still niche?
I installed it on my Desktop, replacing LMDE. Unfortunately I have trouble running the one game that I play even though it works on Linux with Steam. It worked in Linux Mint, but for some reason it won’t start in Bazzite. Surely it’s because I have an Nvidia graphics card, but that wasn’t a problem with Linux Mint.
Another problem that I ran into was Firefox (flatpak) crashing all the time. Luckily you just have to disable wayland using Flatseal, but I still get graphics glitches with it.
I’m thinking of restoring my Linux Mint backup.
I don’t know why I’m responding to your comment, I just wanted to share my experience, I guess.
Out of curiosity, what game?
Aerofly 10
deleted by creator
The atomicity probably counts as an interesting feature, but it does seem to be getting more popular.
May as well contribute my own 😜.
I’m an absolute sucker for exquisitely hardened distros. Hence, distros like Qubes OS and Kicksecure have rightfully caught my interest. However, the former’s hardware requirements are too harsh on the devices I currently own. While the latter relies on backports for security updates; which I’m not a fan of. Thankfully, there is also secureblue.
Contrary to the others, secureblue is built on top of an ‘immutable’ and/or atomic base distro; namely Fedora Atomic. By which:
- It’s protected against certain attacks.
- Enables it to benefit from more recent advancements and developments that benefit security without foregoing robustness.
If security is your top priority, Qubes OS is the gold standard. However, secureblue is a decent (albeit inferior) alternative if you prefer current and/or ‘immutable’/atomic distros.
What, you don’t have 64 GB of RAM?
Jokes aside, the hardware reqs for Qubes are about on-par with Windows, so its not too bad.
Unfortunately my 8gb RAM (for which 2gb is dedicated for the iGPU) isn’t enough. FWIW, this system could technically run Windows (11) without any troubles.
If it can run Windows, it can run Qubes.
Windows 11 minimally requires: Memory: 4 gigabytes (GB) or greater.
Qubes OS minimally requires: Memory: 6 GB RAM
I’m pretty sure Windows 11 would he unusable with 4GB of RAM
Qubes is great, but TAILS is def the gold standard for security
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t compartmentalization through virtualization the best solution we currently have?
Compartmentalization buys you disposable VMs. TAILS is amnesic, which is an improvement to this. Everything is lost between sessions
Compartmentalization buys you disposable VMs.
And more.
TAILS is amnesic, which is an improvement to this.
How? Please focus on the security merits.
Everything is lost between sessions
If this is your reasoning to justify your earlier statement, please explain how this outdoes Qubes OS when it comes to security.
Btw, it seems you’re conflating protection against forensics with a proper security model. In terms of security, TAILS does not provide anything remotely comparable to Qubes OS. Qubes OS is literally built differently. In case you enjoy tables.
the idea with qubes is that whatever you are doing with tails would just be done in a tails/tor qube (vm), which are/can be amnesic.
Not a distro but Qubes. Incredible security and privacy out of the box. Not for everyone but absolutely one of the most interesting developments in the OS world in the past decade or two.
Qubes isn’t a distro?
Not the person you asked, but they might have referred to the fact that (technically) Qubes OS is not a Linux distro because it’s based on Xen instead. Though, even then, we might refer to it as a Xen distro (if anything).
Rhino Linux! A rolling release Ubuntu distribution. It uses the Ubuntu devel repos + pacstall.
hannah montana, nuff said!
Not niche, but surely exotic: NixOS, a distribution that is configured via a purely functional language. There is no such thing as installing or uninstalling packages, you add or remove things from your configuration and then simply apply that configuration.
I really wanted to like NixOS (and I do, theoretically), but I couldn’t dedicate more than 5 full days over Christmas to learn how to get to a working development system.
I couldn’t even get the installer to work. Tried a couple times but it just wouldn’t install so I gave up on it - still want to try it though
You can manually install it
It’s very good for servers. I wouldn’t use it on desktop.
I think it could be good for something like an office, where it might be beneficial to have everyone on an identical setup that’s immutable so they can’t mess with it, and can (presumably) be duplicated by just copying a config file.
I assume the con would be that if something breaks in an update, it probably breaks for everyone. But by the same token, the solution should fix it for everyone too.
Using it on all my machines (desktop and notebooks), can’t really complain – but then again, couldn’t really complain about Arch either
May I ask what the issue actually was? Was it about “working system” or about “working development system”?
I don’t recall needing more than two days for getting a system up and running for the first time, and in fact it worked so well that I switched all my machines to it by now; granted, I have changed a lot about the configuration ever since and there seem to be a lot of paths to take in the beginning and it’s not always clear which one to take. But getting a working system, even one suited for development (personally, I’d recommend a nix development shell for that), shouldn’t really take that long.
I have HoloISO running around on mini PCs because they just work as remote steam machines, can play games in their own right, and I can use them as media boxes if I want. I don’t necessarily recommend it, but it was super easy to install and configure except for the Bluetooth issue that cropped up occasionally where I had to unload and reload the Bluetooth module. Now I just have a script that automatically does that on boot because I can’t give a shit about fixing it.
I also have a couple of Slax USBs running around. They used to be relatively popular with folks who fixed computers. I like building from modules and I’m familiar with Slackware so it was a good fit for a live environment.
I did not know about Slax. Thanks.
I think nixos is still niche, but seems to be gaining momentum. It has some unique features:
- Every package has its own dependencies, so you can install a 7 year old firefox alongside the latest, and have no interference.
- Packages with dependencies in common still share them (for space savings).
- Abandons the HFS, but can still fake it for apps that need it.
- Can make dev environments that are exactly reproducible across machines, and only exist within a specific shell session. So you can have a project that relies on an out of date version of a compiler, and another that uses the latest, and run both at the same time.
- Make your own packages that other people can install using a git repo address.
- The package language can also describe a machine’s configuration; systemd services, default packages, user accounts, etc.
- You can build and remotely deploy a machine config in one line.
- You can cross compile a machine config for another cpu architecture, like ARM.
- OS upgrades are atomic, and reversible. If it doesn’t work out, you can go back to the previous config.
- No reason to ever reinstall. Recently upgraded a machine that had sat in a closet for 5 years to the newest release. Flawless upgrade.
- Nixos boasts more packages than any other distro, over 100,000.
There are certainly downsides - poor docs, confusing core language. Instructions for installing something on say debian will not work on nixos. I do think this style of package management is the future, if perhaps not this specific implementation. It can be a pain but its also super solid.
Obligatory GNU Guix mention
Once the Prescheme project is revived, Guix will be even more faster, with the option to manage memory manually, wherever required.
It says on the webpage it has received a grant from NLnet, has it died since ?
It was announced a few months ago, so we’ll have to wait and see. If the maintain is open to mentorship, I’m jobless anyway, so I’d love to contribute.
I use NixOS on my workstations, and I’m slowly migrating many of my server VMs over to it.
NixOS w/flakes + home-manager + impermanence on zfs + disko w/ nixos-anywhere is amazing and gives an insane amount of declarative control over your system.
That said, the current state of the leadership gives me pause to recommend it to anyone, and I do have a few devil’s advocate responses to some of what you said:
Every package has its own dependencies, so you can install a 7 year old firefox alongside the latest, and have no interference.
Unless the dependency is Qt, then it better all be the same version.
Abandons the HFS, but can still fake it for apps that need it.
Using ldd and nix-alien to patch in dynamic libraries still sucks, and often doesn’t work without a lot of extra effort. If what I want isn’t in nixpkgs, and I can’t get nix-alien to work on the first try, I just end up not using whatever I want trying to run.
I hear you, its great for most cases, but when a package isn’t available or downloads binaries that depend on hfs it sucks. I’ve been going through hell with android dev lately and am currently doing my compiles on debian, lol.
