I use Nobara on my gaming PC just because it has some gaming tweaks by default but is otherwise just stock Fedora so any issues can be searched as if I was on Fedora.

I’m using Dietpi on my Orange pi zero 3. Aaaaaand because I’m (pretty much) forced to.

I Use Cachyos Its because it has alot of gaming tweaks and optimizations and because installing regular arch is quite painful (yeah its a arch based distro)

I use guix because, while it has a small community, the packaging language is one of the easiest I’ve ever used.

Every distro I’ve tried I’ve always run into having to wait on packages or support from someone else. The package transformation scheme like what nixos has is great but Nixlang sucks ass. Being able to do all that in lisp is much preferred.

Plus I like shepherd much more than any of the other process 0’s

I’m using RebeccaBlackOS because it finally utilizes Wayland’s capabilities fully.

Linux culture is about freedom of choice and movement. Any project can be forked, tweaked, expanded, or outright overhauled by anybody with the know-how in order to meet specific use cases. And those use cases are often the same as other’s use cases. But in most cases, they are still rooted in the project they forked from. I.E, any guide that applies to Ubuntu is likely going to apply to Pop!_OS or Mint, since they’re based on Ubuntu. So there’s rarely a downside to niche distros, because you can have something that’s close enough to a popular distro but that caters to your unique needs and wants.

For me, for example, I use Nobara. It’s rather niche and in most cases, it either works beautifully for you, or it doesn’t work at all, honestly. But it’s based on Fedora, so any guide for Fedora is likely to apply to Nobara. I get all the benefits of being on Fedora with tweaks and patches that make my gaming experience much more stable. And quite frankly, Nobara has made my rig run the best it ever has.

These days, it is totally feasible to have the best of both worlds with a niche distro that is exactly what you want and Distrobox with another distro to easily bring in any software that you miss. Distrobox totally solves the compatibility problem.

For example, you could have a MUSL based distro like Alpine or Chimera Linux as your host OS. Need software that does not run on MUSL? Just install a stripped down Debian image on Distrobox and “apt install” whatever you like.

A few weekends ago ( just for fun ), I installed Red Hat 5.2. Not RHEL 5, real Red Hat 5.2 from before the Fedora days. My idea was to build Podman and Distrobox on it so that I could get access to the current Arch Linux repos ( and AUR ). I got a bit lost in dependency hell and did not quite get there but I was close. I might try again sometime.

Just saying, I’ve never had a virus with Temple OS.

I too prefer big distros, but niche distros are usually big distros with small tweaks in the default config or installed packages. It’s Debian/Fedora/Arch slightly tweaked.

Debian for ages, now Gentoo, Slackware and occasionally Devuan. Not really niche i’d say…

Because i like choice and flexibility.

deleted by creator

I really like immutable distros, and am currently using NixOS. I feel like despite still being relatively obscure, NixOS is a bit of an outlier since it has more packages than any other distro and is (so far) the only distro I’ve used that has never broken. There is a steep learning curve, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for non programmers, but it is something truly different than all mainstream Linux distros while being extremely reliable.

Gentoo linux, the main reason is ive tried many distros, which to alot of there credit worked pretty well for 99% of stuff. But like for example bazzite somthing broke upstream to where because of how OCI works and it layers systems. It takes Silverblue and adds alot of packages to become Bazzite and then my repo stripped out stuff i didnt want. But it became A NIGHTMARE when your builds fail and you cant figure out why. And its because of somthing upstream. And you cannot build/update because upstream brokey. And like with NixOS which i still daily on my main rig, but gentoo on everything else. Is really powerful but the immutability gets in your way for some things and it takes alot of time to adapt scripts or troubleshoot. So i ended up installing gentoo on my other computers because they do simple tasks, i dont half to worry about breakage because of snapper and stable channel (at least on the NAS) And its alot of fun to turn a live CD into a OS that has only what you want in it. SystemD or OpenRC, hardened toolchains or normal? And distcc and binhost are S tier

I wouldn’t say it’s a full on daily, but Bunsenlabs distros. It started out with Lithium because they had a non PAE build and I needed it for an old Pentium M laptop. I ended up really liking it. It’s debian at the end of the day so software support is plentiful. It’s super lightweight. It ran on the pentium m laptop (only 1 gb of ram) without much issue. It’s also baby’s first foray into window managers as it used openbox.

I ended up installing it on my other old laptop that has an 8th gen i7. I’ve been pretty happy with it as a result.

I.have 2 gripes but idk if it’s Bunsenlabs’s fault. I had an nvme ssd that refused to play ball with it, a Samsung PM991A nvme ssd. I couldnt work with it at all. Using gparted to format it was a no go as Gparted would just die. I know that line of ssds is problematic in the hackintosh community. Not surprised that it sucks here. Also trying to disable the lid close is impossible. Tried cli, can’t find my lid close sensor. It might be because it’s a x360 laptop so it’s a lot more complex lid detection wise.

I shouldn’t talk because I dip in and out, but I do that because I like the possibilities. Like, what if someone comes up with a concept, but no one tries it, and it turns out to really work? Like, I like immutability as a concept, so I’ve tried Silverblue, Kinoite, and Bazzite. If nobody gave it a go, then the concept would die on the vine.

Also, I like seeing different ways of thinking about technology.