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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Solus
Is budgie still being developed?
It split from Solus, but yeah.
It is in the OS development was rebased too. The creators endless OS distribution instead
I think you meant to say serpentOS?
You’re right, for some reason I always think they call it endlessOS. Coffee must not have kicked in when I wrote that.
I used Solus on my old laptop. Same install for 7 years!
Once proton became good I moved my gaming PC from windows to Solus as well.
Though I use Debian on everything else these days.
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. :-)
NixOS
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
Does Gentoo count?
It’s not that unpopular. I chose it because it is very powerful. It really makes use of every Linux power there is. It makes solving problems yourself much easier, and customization is big.
Gentoo master race! :-D
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Fedora++
Guix, because I love nix but love lisp even more
Bodhi Linux. I have an old hp desktop and it only has 2 gb of ram and 2 cores. I wanted a real lightweight distro and settled on arch linux but one day i tripped and knocked the tower over. When i booted it back up i had the infamous blinking underscore. I tried reinstalling arch multiple times and it kept failing, so i tried a lightweight arch based distro called archbang, same issue. I tried manjaro same issue.
At this point i wanted to try something not arch based but wanted something that came with minimal preinstalled programs like arch. Research led me to bodhi which is a light weight distro based on ubuntu. Installed with no issues and been using it ever since, about 3 years now.
Don’t know what i damaged on the motherboard but it must have been something integral to arch based distros, but i’m kind of glad it happened because i love bodhi now
It has allowed an ancient computer to do so much. I’ve run matrix servers and web servers, written my own webapps to run on it and so much more
I use Ubuntu, which is apparently the least popular distro around.
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Not OP, but as someone using Ubuntu LTS releases on several systems, I can answer my reason: Having the latest & greatest release of all software available is neat, but sometimes the stability of knowing “nothing on my system changes in any significant way until I ask it to upgrade to the next LTS” is just more valuable.
My primary example is my work laptop: I use a fairly fixed set of tools and for the few places where I need up-to-date ones I can install them manually (they are often proprietary and/or not-quite established tools that aren’t available in most distros anyway).
A similar situation exists on my primary homelab server: it’s running Debian because all the “services” are running in docker containers anyway, so the primary job of the OS is to do its job and stay out of my way. Upgrading various system components at essentially random times runs counter to that goal.
Also not OP, but I learned about the pain of Nvidia drivers the hard way. No way in hell am I letting my system auto update on a work day
Yeah, I use Ubuntu LTS on my server because updates make me nervous. I can’t just update it all willy-nilly. If something goes wrong during an update, I must stop what I’m doing and get it up ASAP.
A few months ago I accidentally deleted grub the morning before I went to an all day concert, and I had lots of unhappy people that were using services that I host. Luckily that was an easy fix.
My laptop, though? I use Opensuse Tumbleweed. I’m fine with the rolling release for my laptop. Just not my server.
In fairness, I’ve been using it since 2004. So I was using a less popular linux. It’s not my fault the world has changed. So I think it counts and is completely relevant to the spirit of the question. /s
I use Manjaro and based on the downvotes I received when mentioning it around here, I can assure that you are excused and you can give me this crown.
I understand the criticisms of manjaro, and don’t recommend it to people, but it seems to be the only distro to work with my hardware/software without issue. So for now, here I am.
Fantastic distro.
None of the criticisms people have against it affect me.
Manjaro is great. I keep on coming back to it time to time.
Lol same. When I installed Manjaro it was a popular choice, but in the past couple years sentiment has really turned against it. I haven’t experienced any of the problems people claim it has, so I can’t be arsed to distro hop again.
Exactly where I’m at. I’ve had no issues with it, I have my home computer all set up and customized over the last 3 years, I’m not doing that again just to say that I’m on a different distro unless something goes very wrong.
I use Ubuntu, it’s the default for ROS. I tried debian but the instructions didn’t work instantly so I just as quickly gave up and went back to Ubuntu since I was busy. Lol.
Does using Alpine for your desktop count? I don’t do any server or container stuff, it works like any other distro and the packages are quite up-to-date so…
I switched to NixOS almost two years ago, and it’s really nice being able to define my whole system in a single set of config files. If my hard drive dies or I switch computers, I can just reinstall NixOS using my config files and everything will be set up the exact same way. It’s extremely solid and I don’t need to baby my system because if it breaks I can just reinstall everything back to normal.
And I can share parts of the config between devices, so when I change my Neovim or VSCodium configs using Home-Manager it gets synced to my other devices, as well as being saved as part of my NixOS config files.
Im still toying with the idea of nix (using Fedora rn) but I don’t code at all rn and don’t need to rebuild my system all the time so I think it’s pointless
+1 for Nix. In my case I switched from Opensuse Tumbleweed to NixOS about a year ago. Before NixOS I had spent years distro-hopping fairly regularly just in an effort to find something that was atleast moderately simple to setup/troubleshoot, (I’m no developer, and my Linux technical expertise really only covers the basics) and that would be resilient to the careless tinkering I tended to do in general.
Using NixOS on a daily basis has been a complete pleasure. After experiencing the sane-ness of a declarative system I’ll never go back. As of late, NixOS seems to have been growing steadily in popularity, although most of its userbase are experienced developers, businesses, and almost no Linux beginners. This is understandable given its current state and reputation as an advanced distro, but I am of the opinion that–if a GUI software store for nixpkgs and a GUI program for editing the system’s configuration options were developed–NixOS could quickly become one of the most desktop user-friendly distros available given its underlying immutability and unrivalled stability in general.
I don’t understand how tinkering proofness achieved through learning “Nix syntax” is any better for the average joe compared to a the default settings of tumbleweed including snapper.
NixOS has snapshots built in as well but I’ve never had to actually use them to recover anything because Nix packages are built in isolation from one another, and their dependencies are declared, so packages can’t break each other when installing or upgrading them.
NixOS is also an immutable distro, which prevents accidental bad changes to the system. Tumbleweed is very friendly and stable compared to many other distros out there, but it’s still vulnerable to accidental breakage in the same ways most other distros are. I think the cherry on top for the average joe using Nix compared to OpenSUSE, however, is just the fact that the Nixpkgs repository absolutely dwarfs OpenSUSE’s.
Luckily, if you prefer to stick with whatever distro you’re running already, but want the power of the Nix package manager, you can get the best of both worlds and install just Nix (without NixOS) on any distro.
Manjaro.
It does what I need it to in a way that is convenient and accessible to me.
I agree with pretty much all of their design decisions and am just looking for a preconfigured Arch.
Been running it exclusively for the past 3 years and have no inclination on switching.
There was definitely a time when I would have considered Manjaro a less mainstream distro, but I’ve been running into fellow Manjaro users everywhere!
I wipe & reinstall on my phones and computers more than the average user. I like it fresh and I like it fast. Manjaro stays fast and this install of mine is a year or two old now! Any other distro would have been reinstalled a few times now or I would have gone distro-hopping searching for better functionality.
I love the control I get when it comes to sources. AUR, flatpacks, and appimages are all good for me, but no snap shall touch this computer of mine. I have a few minor annoyances with my setup, and am really curious to see how the next plasma update effects things.
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Same here. Have been a Mint user for more than 10 years and switched recently with the new laptop. I like it a lot, really stable system.
Same here. I used Fedora with gnome before, but this summer I bought a Tuxedo laptop and saw that they maintain their own distro. And as I have been happy with fedora and gnome for way too long, it was time for a switch.
Not my daily but I carry around a usb with slax linux as a portable work environment as well as a recovery tool.
voidlinux on my laptop (from Fedora) - why? I wanted to see what a systemd-less distro was like nowadays. I have used Linux since 1992 and Unix since 1984 so I’m used to SysVinit. What I find with voidlinux is a system I can understand easily - not that I struggle with systemd, but I felt there was just so much happening under the hood, just too clever by half. If I wanted MacOS, I’d have bought an Apple.
The packaging system on voidlinux is sooooo much faster than fedora. The really weird thing is that my battery life almost doubled. I can’t explain it except to say that the laptop is much calmer than under fedora, which seems to run the fan constantly. Same workload, CPU governers, powertop tweaks etc etc - but battery life almost doubled.
The one downside is a smaller array of packages in the repositories. But since I’m happy installing from source for those few corner cases, it’s no biggie.
I’ve left fedora on my media/file server for now as I still do some fedora packaging (mainly for sway related packages).
Void is just soo good.
- Runit is super simple and makes sense to me. - I get to build the distro the way I want it.
- I’ve learned a ton about the inner workings of Linux using Void for the last 3 years.
- You’re right about packages, but I’ve not had issues as I’ve found flatpacks or appimages for anything not offered.
- Xbps has spoiled me. I HATE using almost every other package manager. They’re all so slow and cumbersome.
I LOVE void, while I did need to do a bit more research at times, I felt like it taught me more about how an OS functions. The first time I made my own unit script was also super satisfying.
Sounds like some sort of weird bug under Fedora, given the huge difference.
Void and Alpine are great for their simplicity and speed, I’m using those two exclusively outside of work.
I consider it too from Artix. I heard it has lots of (often broken) AUR packages in the repo?
i distrohopped a lot until i landed on Void, then i just stayed because it does everything i need, it’s fast, understandable, easily tweakable, and rock solid
I used Void with xfce for a year and I feel like it was the best “new” distro I’ve ever had my hands on. It was clean, efficient and I loved initd and xbps.
Very well written. Makes me wanna try out void again (although I am very fine with debian)
Void here too. I was mostly Solaris & OpenBSD for many years, Void is the first linux I’m happy to run on my main machines.
I realized I was going to be comfortable with Void when I saw in the docs that to config the network you just “put the commands in rc.local”. Ha ha. Yes, that’s how you’d do it in 7th Edition Unix! Back to the basics.
What made you go away from OpenBSD? Really curious, did you actually use it as a desktop system?
Yes, although the thing on my desk is just an x-term & media player, so “desktop system” doesn’t mean that much…
Mostly video performance (1080 vid stuttered badly, while it plays fine on the same machine under linux.) & compatability. (Not that I want to run a browser on my x-term, but it would be nice to have as a fallback option. Can’t install anything recent.) Oh, and extended attributes in the filesystem. I REALLY like being able to add name=val tags to a file. It’s immensely useful. That might be my favorite feature of linux? Funny.
Also, I was in the midst of switching from Solaris to Linux on my server, so it just seemed like a good idea to run the same OS on the desktop.
