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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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.
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 So you can have a project that relies on an out of date version of a compiler, and another that uses the latest, and run both at the same time.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.
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 was 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.
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.
Alpine. The Linux, not GNU/Linux joke aside, Alpine’s kinda great. Light, fast, stable, great package manager. I’ve daily driven it on both a server and as my main distro and it’s pretty nice for both… Unless you’re on Nvidia.
My first intro to it was with postmarketOS, and I have to say it felt super light and stable
Huh, I’d never actually considered that Alpine Linux existed as something other than a base for docker containers.
Yeah, that’s many people’s impression of it.
Want there a post I saw just the other day about Nvidia starting to make open source releases with one of the upcoming driver updates? I just saw it yesterday and didn’t even think I checked it out yet but it’s somewhere here on my “look at better later” lists here.
It would be fine then if that was true.
Just the kernel module, which still interacts with the proprietary driver.
Well there goes that good news. I hadn’t finished looking into it, it’s still in a tab I stashed here somewhere.
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.
I have yet to read of a truly obscure distribution, so here is mine: Parabola GNU/Linux-libre. It is Arch Linux minus non-free software - every bit of software considered not fully free is rigorously left out. In respect to other GNU/Linux distributions, its stance against non free software is very strict. It is one of a handful of GNU/Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation. I have used it as my main operating system for more than ten years. The absence of proprietary firmware can be troublesome for most. While officially unsupported, it is technically possible to load proprietary firmware, but you may need to jump through hoops to install and use some proprietary software as is the case for proprietary firmware. Another downside is that some packages, especially from the KDE project, can be outdated due to lack of manpower.
I have a thinkpad that runs this. It’s a great little distro.
That sounds like true freedom, and also like something I wish deeply that I had time and energy to make my daily driver - I’m a purist, but I’m also a pragmatist and i can feel the burnout already.
Respect for using it as a daily driver - even for a personal only machine, that’s a pretty high bar, especially long term.
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)
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.
I agree with this. In the case of Chimera Linux, it is a goal of the distro to have “no legacy” and so it is Wayland and Pipewire only from the start. That limited their choices back when they were making the decision.
Xfce is still X only although they are making progress.
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.
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.
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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).
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That sounds like BlendOS. I haven’t tried either of them, but sounds really cool!
aaa
Yeah, I noticed. I miss not having a declarative system, but agree on Nix. I don’t have the time to learn all that. I think it seemed neat to use yaml, since it is pretty straight forward
I really wanted to try BlendOS but the installer didn’t work at all for me and a couple others (this was when v4 was released). Haven’t tried again recently though.
Guix - It’s basically an abstraction over software compilation and distribution. It uses guile lisp language as glue to bind it all together. (Full programming language to configure with)
The beauty arises if you want to get a minimal os running with a single application and package it either as a full iso or a docker container you can. Or if you need to get an OS to run as your router.
It’s also highly encourages free software to the point, that proprietary software actually feels like huge downgrade to include. (Compilation from source is always available)
I’ve been using this only for 11 months. I’ve barely scratched the surface on what is possible. So I’m pretty sure I’m not making it justice on what a gem it is. For example: Only recently I started to use programs in an immutable way.
The only thing I don’t like is that the packages are outdated. Node is really lagging behind.
The guix manual is pretty well explained. Now i’m learning Guile (Scheme’s dialog) and learning to configure both guix and guix system.
The fact of being able to revert system and home environment software installation and configuration without breaking anything, is too good to be true.
It’s also very cool to define packages either as compiled software or source packages to compile.
Since there are not many developers there are some build systems that are more prioritized than others. If you come from emacs side of things, it’s great. Rust is around 4 versions older. And the single developer recently burned out. The package manager is a lot like nixos, so every package requires work to introduce to the system.
In NixOS there’s a bot that automatically bumps versions
The NixOS ecosystem while maybe sometimes both chaotic and heavily centralized just seems miles ahead of what Guix System has to offer unfortunately; nix is a weird language (I’m not qualified to rate it but people have called it a bad DSL), but it does the job, and there were some factors that ruled out Guix System for me. Secure Boot support was one of them, which NixOS doesn’t support “natively”, but there is Lanzaboote. For better or for worse this kind of forced me to look into flakes very early.
Thanks for the info, although versioning afaik not the thing that keeps it behind. There are tools to import the necessary packages with ‘guix import crate’. It automatically selects the necessary packages.
Difficulties arise when Cargo.toml for example uses git as source. Then you have to pull and write specifications for not a standard package. The build system is isolated and cannot download anything off the internet.
So what nix does is it hashes the inputs, so git still works even immutably if the hash matches
Does nix require the exact commit be written out for the package, or does it generate a hash during the build taking the newest git commit?
You need to write the hash in the package, so it requires the exact commit
https://www.crunchbangplusplus.org/
Crunchbang was one of the first Linux experiences I had and then found ++, I stopped using it recently to try out pop!os but the idea of crunchbang++ never leaves me. It was great on my little thin client laptop
My first linux install was crunchbang. I don’t remember why I picked it. Perhaps i liked the minimalistic look. Ended up not really liking openbox and I vaguely remember running into some problem with debian’s old packages, though I honestly can’t remember what. So I switched to ubuntu, which was great for me as a linux noob.
I started using Crunchbang because it was so lightweight and ran great on Virtual Box on Windows 7. I stopped using it, when they stopped developing it. I wasn’t aware of ++. I will be installing it this evening.
I know this might be asking for trouble, but how does BunsenLabs compare to CB++? I know they both came out of Crunchbang but I went with BL when that died.
These days I’m on EndeavourOS, but I still use Openbox instead of DEs and customize it to look as much like Crunchbang as possible 😄
Edit: also, I feel naked without Conky on my desktop.
how does BunsenLabs compare to CB++? I know they both came out of Crunchbang but I went with BL when that died.
Also interested. Same scenario.
Is Bazzite still niche?
The atomicity probably counts as an interesting feature, but it does seem to be getting more popular.
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.
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This bug really bugs me. On Libre Wolf so I’ll probably have to wait a bit longer.
Oh sorry, didn’t mean to blame Bazzite for that. Was just a new thing for me to deal with.
Out of curiosity, what game?
Aerofly 10
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.
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.
For me, the main blocker was just getting my head around the concept of it, as it seems like such a wild idea for a distro. I still don’t think I’m 100% there, but I have enough down now to cobble a working system together at least.
Working development system. I got quite far, but after so much work, became very frustrated when a VSCode plugin wouldn’t work properly because it needed (and assumed) read/write access. I didn’t want to have to manage and think about every little plugin I experimented with at the OS level.
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
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
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.
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 be unusable with 4GB of RAM
Got anything to back that up?
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 so much a niche distribution, but I would like to recommend Chimera Linux, because it combines musl with BSD userland.
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.
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.
Makes sense. Thanks for the info!
Not to be confused with ChimeraOS
