Hey fellow Linux enthusiasts! I’m curious to know if any of you use a less popular, obscure or exotic Linux distribution. What motivated you to choose that distribution over the more mainstream ones? I’d love to hear about your experiences and any unique features or benefits that drew you to your chosen distribution.
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I use MX, formerly know as Mepis. Super stable and kept up to date. It used to be Debian based and they still use some Debian repos but it’s largely independent now
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Fedora++
I use Slackware, which is so unpopular it doesn’t even show up in this thread, yet.
What made me choose it is the fact that it hardly ever changes, at all. It’s a bit weird to set up at first, but all knowledge gained about it will stay relevant for a very long time. Also, it is a real general purpose distro, so I can use it on my gaming PC, laptop and server.Debian would probably be a better choice when I just take practicability into account, but I like Slackware’s philosophy, and running a system that forces me to learn it inside out. Arch is too bleeding edge for me.
I would love to use Slackware as a daily driver, but no package management OOTB makes me feel I am not worthy of using it. I believe third-party tools exist, so maybe I will use it at some point, but perhaps I’d be better served with Void for now
In practice, Slackware package management after installation works like Arch’s AUR.
You install (or build) packages from a community-maintained repo and are officially supposed to do it manually and always read the build scripts and READMEs, but a helper with dependency resolution (slpkg) exists, works well and most people use it.What do you use? What are some problems you have with Slackware?
I use slackpkg+ which is an addon to the default package manager that allows you to install packages from community and third-party repositories.
And sbopkg which gives you a TUI frontend to install Slackbuilds (Slackware-specific build scripts for building from source).
Neither offer dependency resolution, which I don’t really need anyway.Now that I know how Slackware works and what its quirks are, I don’t really have any issues with it. But it’s pretty hard to figure that out when you’re coming from more modern distros. It throws curveballs at you, like not booting after a kernel upgrade if you forget to copy the new kernel to your EFI partition and recreate the initramfs.
Most online documentation is wildly out of date and googling is no help due to how few users there are.
It took a while till I figured out the README files that come preinstalled with the distro are actually the official, up-to-date documentation and very helpful, and also that the place where most users (including the maintainers and author of the distro) gather and answer questions is the linuxquestions.org forum.How do you install packages without appropriate dependency resolution?
I didn’t know about that. I should probably run it in a VM for a while before trying
You read the package’s .dep file, which lists dependencies, add those to your install queue in the right order and then install the queue.
It’s not as daunting as it sounds, since the default Slackware installation already includes most common dependencies.
The most dependencies I ever had to install for a package were 3. But if you need a lot of additional software with many dependencies, it’s best to do it just once for installing slpkg and then let that tool deal with it.Thanks. I’m probably going to install some software for IOT devices alongside the usual workstation stuff (vim, tmux, browsers, audio, git, htop, a WM with add-ons etc). I’ll take a look at
slpkg.
Not sure if I will continue using Gentoo, but thats what I’ve been using for the past.
I was curious just to try to install it, but after I did it and learned about portage (package manager) and the USE flags and I really liked it beacause it gives you so much control. For example, dont want packages to have bluetooth because your motherboard doesn’t support bluetooth? You can do it via USE flags per package or globally. Idk I just really like this.
But im hella busy rn in college so I might go back to arch or fedora.
Edit: Brain no worky meant to say for the past month… mb
Fellow Gentoo user here, personally I find that most of the time, it doesn’t really take extra time once it’s been set up. World updates do take ages, but they can be done in the background. Most of the time my config doesn’t break anything.
Not sure if KDE Neon counts as a “less popular” distro, but it’s what I’ve been using for around the last half year. I appreciate the stability of being based on the latest Ubuntu LTS along with the package availability of a Ubuntu-based distro, while also getting all the latest updates to KDE software and enough updates to other software to keep me satisfied. Snap is installed but not default (my system uses very minimal numbers of snaps as a result) and Flatpak is installed so I can also easily install software that’s not in the Ubuntu LTS repos as a binary.
I used KDE Neon for a while for a similar reason. I just needed a home to think and watch for a few months while the Snap thing played out. It works and you get fresh KDE, which just so happens to be my favorite DE!
My fav obscure distros are: 1. Sparky Linux, Debian based simple stable system. It has many flavours with a lot of desktops to choose from. Also has stable and semi-roling iso. Now I never installed Debian itself, so can’t compare sparky with Debian. But it is very much better than any other distro I used. I don’t know why it is not popular. 2. Reborn OS. I used to love it when running. Arch based lovely project. This is the very much successor of Antergos.
Have you tried Spiral too?
Spiral, yes I had a glance on it. It seemed the Gecko of Debian, as expected. I did not find it too different than sparky, so I did not embrace it well. Not planning to see again for now either. If I get a chance to try a new distro, I’d install Void or NixOS. For now I am happy with Arch or ubuntu family.
Bodhi Linux. I have an old System76 Starling netbook that stopped working after some updates left it in the dust. I think it had a netbook version of Ubuntu on it originally. Years later I installed Bodhi Linux on it (since it was supposed to be good for low spec machines) and I currently use it as an Angband terminal, a photo slideshow device, and occasionally surf the web with it just because I can :)
I’m amazed at how well it works with an Intel Atom processor, 2GB of ram, and a 250GB disk drive. Kudos to the Bodhi Linux team.
Tried it out as a last resort on an old ThinkPad … and had it running for some 5 years. This is a seriously good daily driver!
There are plenty of these “light” systems. All are fast and snappy until you open a web browser :(
True. I tried some other rather light-weight distros but no other gave me a comparable polished experience.
Bodhi was really cool when I briefly tried it out. I bet it could revive my old netbook. I have a special spot in my heart for distros that work well with low spec hardware.
Today im an Arch user, however in the past i was a Big Linux user. Even more in the past, i was user of Kurumin Linux
Fedora Kinoite. Some time in the future this will only be Fedora KDE though. The future of well structured, versioned and controlled Linux Distros. So easy to service, I would never want to maintain a fleet of PCs with anything else
Garuda Linux, if that counts. It’s the best and most beginner friendly arch based distro imho. I need wine-staging and it comes packaged for arch which is very nice since I keep having troubles with it on non arch based disteos. On debian for instance it broke with every update, damn winehq install.
WineHQ on Debian is hell
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NixOS
Alpine Linux. I started using it to dogfood my packages I was maintaining for postmarketOS but I’ve come to really like it. It does help that I can just fix packaging problems (or just missing packages entirely) myself.
Previously I used Gentoo which I still have a place in my heart for. If I’d ever move to anything else it would probably be Gentoo again.
I guess SteamOS? It’s immutable and… well runs on the SteamDeck which is pretty cool. I use it to play, obviously, but also to work. Love it.
Happy SteamOS / SteamDeck user here, too. SteamOS would be mainstream in my book. (Nonetheless, Valve did a great job with it, never experienced any problems with it and everything just works.)
Not to diminish what Valve has achieved there (it’s an amazing PC/console hybrid, love mine).
But a smooth experience without any hitches is much easier to achieve when your hardware variation basically boils down to “how big is the SSD”. The fact that all Steamdecks run the same hardware helps keep things simple.
I guess that’s also the reason why they are not (yet?) pushing the new SteamOS as a general-purpose distribution for everyone to use. Doing that would/will require much more manpower.
Good point and I agree 100%.
Funnily enough, I am looking forward to the Apple silicon distributions from Fedora etc., because the lack of hardware variation in the Apple ecosystem helps here, too. :-)
