Who here uses a less popular Linux distribution? What made you choose it?

mFat@lemdro.id to Linux@lemmy.ml – 205 points –

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 Ubuntu, which is apparently the least popular distro around.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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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.

+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.

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

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).

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.

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.

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.

Void and Alpine are great for their simplicity and speed, I'm using those two exclusively outside of work.

Sounds like some sort of weird bug under Fedora, given the huge difference.

I consider it too from Artix. I heard it has lots of (often broken) AUR packages in the repo?

I don't know if openSUSE Tumbleweed counts as a less popular distro but it's certainly underrated. I chose it with a roll of the dice and stayed because it's bloody good.

Yeah btrfs and snapshots on TW is amazing. Also TW is rock solid even though it is a rolling distro.

My first Linux distro was SuSE 7.x, just because we had an installation box in the high school library. 8 CDs to install packages from etc. Funny stuff.

Then I played with Gentoo & Debian for a couple of years, but went back to openSuSE once I started my first real job. We had to use it because we needed a Red Hat compatible and enterprise ready Linux. And I am using openSuSE to this day if I have a choice. Everything works, if I quickly need something YaST can configure a lot of shit and is just super user-friendly.

But I recommend Leap for day-to-day work, Tumbleweed with its rolling updates keeps updating almost 24/7.

Is Gentoo lacking enough popularity?

If so, I use it because it offers unrivalled flexibility, even compared to Arch, portage, which is an epic package manager, a dedicated security team, reasonably large community and developer base, source-based package distribution and fast package updates, which often outpace even arch.

I like it because -Ofast -flto go brrr

I've been running crunchbang++ on an older laptop since they updated to the latest Debian release.

I love how simple and speedy it is and since it's based on Debian 12 and GTK 4 I can still run all my software super easily.

It's also become my go-to live distro.

#! Was my go to distro for a long time. I was really happy to hear that the #!++ distro was now trucking along.

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.

I use Void Linux on my home servers and I really like it. Clean , small, and stable.

Fedora Silverblue

I use Fedora Silverblue, I don't know if that (still) counts as "underground"-distro.

Reason I switched: I've been distrohopping/ desktophopping for the whole time I used Linux (~2-3 years) and always came back to Fedora. I really like it's sane (for me) defaults.

Problem: I broke pretty much any system I installed after a few weeks.
Knowing enough to change everything, but doing exactly that without knowing exactly what I do and how to fix stuff is really bad.
Instead of fixing a problem, I just reinstalled. That took me just an hour everytime, but still is a bad practice, even when it's quicker.

Also, everytime I was happy with Gnome, KDE got a shiny new feature I just wanted to have, and I switched the Fedora spin, since switching DE on a used system feels really dirty and buggy.

The last time I broke my (Tumbleweed) install without actually doing anything I just said "Fuck it, even if I loose some freedom, I will now only use immutable systems from now on!".

I decided for Fedora, and oh boy...

Actually, I didn't loose much freedom or functionality at all!

(Only exception: no VPN app, I have to use the menu from Gnome; and somehow, Boxes doesn't work atm, maybe that's just a bug).

I'm now using it for 2 months and couldn't be happier!!! Why?

  • Atomic updates + super quick and easy rollback support (already saved my butt) by rebooting and selecting another image.

  • Clear separation between "my" stuff and the OS, which is really intuitive.

  • Feels clean.

  • I can rebase anytime I want (switch to KDE, a WM, and so on) with one command and no residual data or bugs.

  • Self maintaining with automatic updates in the background.

  • Unlimited software: not an advantage of SB, but you have to use distrobox sometimes, and I would never discovered that tool without!

  • AND, a project called uBlue . You can create or download custom images, like a SteamOS/ Nobara-clone, Vanilla with QOL-changes, almost all DEs (e.g. XFCE, which is unsupported by default), and so on.

I'm really in love with Silverblue, everybody should check it out!

Is it still necessary to reboot if you install/update/remove some system package?

Yes and no.
As the other commenter said, you can apply live if it has to be (but you absolutely shouldn't).

But, I never have to reboot anyway. When I install apps, I do that in containers (Toolbox, Distrobox, Flatpak) and they give me all functionality I need.
You basically only install drivers and absolutely essential stuff per OSTree and you only do that once.

Updates get applied and installed in the background for me. There's no prompt to reboot, they only get staged.
I shut down my PC every few days anyway, and when I boot, I boot into the new image.

I don't see that as a problem. Rebooting is only a matter of seconds on a NVME

I haven't really used Tool/Distrobox so correct me if I'm wrong, but don't they basically contain a sort of a lightweight copy of the OS (minus the kernel/and some core stuff? ), so wouldn't you have to keep all your containers up-to-date as well, in addition to your host OS? I'm just wondering how much of a double-up/space waste there is going on with such a setup.

I'm no expert, so I can't help you much.

The container downloaded in less than a minute in my case, and I have really really bad internet.
The containers are really minimalist (basically only a set of dependencies) and shouldn't take much disk space.

Heck, and even if they do, space is really cheap anyway.
They function sort of like how Flatpaks do. With Flatpaks, you also don't download a whole OS, only dependencies.

Maintainence wise, you're right.
Normally, you would have to type the "distrobox-upgrade" command to update all containers.
In my case, since I use uBlue, this gets done automatically afaik.

Not strictly, no - there is an apply-live option now. Restarting is still a good idea though as with any distro.

I use NixOS for very similar reasons. And also, because I like my full configuration in one place.

Yeah, I fully get why people like Nix.

I fully respect it when people want a "next-gen-Arch" with the DIY-aspect of building their own OS. At least, that's my impression on it.

For me personally, it sounds like too much work. I'm not advanced enough and want something hassle free that "just works".

But especially for professional developers (reproducibility) and Linux enthusiasts, it sounds like a dream!

As a fellow Silverblue user, I really wanted to like NixOS. I was surprised to discover it did not support declarative management of flatpak workflows, which pretty much eliminated it as an option for me. That, combined with its highly unconventional filesystem hierarchy, and its cumbersome configuration and project documentation was enough to send me back to Silverblue.

Don't get me wrong, NixOS is very powerful and an excellent solution for some use cases; it just wasn't right for mine.

I don't know if I'd count it because I'd consider it part of Fedora, but +1 for Silverblue. I've been playing with it for 3 years and daily driving it for the past year - it's been great seeing it improve during that time and feels like the future.

I used to have Silverblue for my work laptop OS, I broke it quite fast, multiple times, got annoyed, switched to NixOS like on my home setup. I am the person that tinkers with everything, and NixOS just wont die. I need to install it only once per computer's drive lifetime.

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Another for crunchbang++ a really good minimal Debian distro with no desktop environment, just Openbox window manager. Have been using since it picked up from the original crunchbang. Have built my own kinda desktop environment how I like it and I will never change.

OpenMandriva. It is the official successor from Mandrake/Mandriva and has a rolling release edition called ROME which has brand new software. It is independent too and does not belong to a corporation.

We are looking for developers, packagers, translators, supporters. If you are interested come and join our Matrix chat :)

Does it still use RPM packages?

DNF and RPM, yes. You can usw zypper too. There is also a znver1 Architecture Edition optimized for the Zen/Ryzen CPU architecture.

I'd be more interested in what obscure text editors, window managers, etc people were using regardless of distro. Distro in my mind is about software release and install philosophy, any distribution that comes with a lot of preinstalled software is generally built on the back of a more skeletal distribution, and is interesting mostly for what software choices it makes.

You do have a point but distributions are not just about the package software. They are also about user experiences, workflows and aesthetics.

I used LeftWM for a while, it's a window manager built in rust. One of the cool things about it was its themes functionality. You put all your dot files in a particular directory for things like your bar, and then you can save and switch multiple themes with a short command. Had some interesting community ones too like one based on the Star Trek TNG computer terminals. Ended up moving away from it after a while because it just didn't quite feel polished enough for a daily deiver yet and I got a little tired of the constant tweaking

I just installed Linux two nights ago! I tried Mint but it wouldn't install because of RST being enabled. I didn't feel comfortable trying to disable it, I was afraid I'd break something. I installed OpenSuse Tumbleweed and it went smoothly! It's been fun being on linux. I customized the theme, downloaded some updates and got Steam working. My only issue is booting into it. I have to boot into windows, restart holding shift and then boot to USB SSD from there. My next goal is getting a boot screen that will allow me to pick Linux or Windows drive.

Good for you. Happy to see a new user. Good luck on your Linux journey. And remember if someone recommends you remove the french language pack don't do it.

Do you have fast boot enabled in Windows? Every Linux distribution I've tried installs grub or systemd-boot by default, so not having a boot selection screen is odd.

Tumbleweed is great for ancient devices, too. Even Arch doesn't officially support 32bit systems anymore, but OpenSuse still does

Sounds like a bios issue, you need to set USB devices to have a higher priority than your internals,. You can probably access your bios settings by pressing something like F10-12 on boot, usually there is a splash screen that tells you what to press.

I've used alpine a lot on my laptop, though it's currently been relegated to my home server only. It's a great distro, if you can live with it's limitations. Stable, fast, compact and has a great package manage.

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.

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've been using Source Mage for about a year now! It's a source-based distro like Gentoo. It's magic themed, so instead of repositories we have grimoires, and instead of packages we have spells :) my main reason for using it is because I tried it out a few years ago and the magic themed intrigued me. Eventually I decided to write some of my own spells (some important programs were missing that I wanted) I found them a lot easier to parse than gentoos ebuilds personally. But after I'd been sending PRs for a few months, I got added to the team as an official maintainer!

it's a really fun distro to use, if not a bit hard to get up-and-running (only tarball-based install, we used to have ISOs but they're out of date for now) I've put a lot of work into getting it how i like it, i enjoy the tinkering aspect of it :) its fun

I've been a crux user for over 10 years now. I switched to it from Archlinux because it uses a port tree system for packages (think of it as the AUR but for everything) and because the package "recipes" are very simple and easy to write.

At the time I was packaging a lot of stuff on Arch and the PKGBUILD format felt too bulky, complex and constraining for my needs. I switch to crux and found one of the simplest distro out there, and sticked to it. It's also the Linux distro that feels the most like OpenBSD, which is neat as well.

Also the mascot.

That's an interesting distro. Can you provide a bit more info as to how it differs from a source-first distribution like Gentoo?

Crux is also "source first", as you must compile every package from source. However, Gentoo focuses on "use flags" to build the packages, which let's you fine tune every single feature. Crux ports don't have that, so you technically end up with the same software for everyone, except that they're optimized for your architecture.

Its main advantage is the simplicity of the system as a whole, as well as the build system, which leads to Pkgfile that are very straightforward to write.

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 use Void Linux. I switched from Arch btw because I liked their package manager, was curious about their init system runit, and still wanted a rolling release. I've used it for a little over a year now and overall I've been happy.

I was the same but in 2017. Six years later and I’m still using the same Void install. There’s simply no reason for me to switch, it’s perfect and I have my system tailored exactly to my liking at this point.

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

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.

Open Media Vault (OMV)! I was given a used QNAP NAS, but didn't want to use their OS. TrueNAS has higher system requirements than what I had and Unraid is paid. OMV has been a dream! Having the flexibility of a full Debian OS, but also with the prepackaged software I need, it amazing. Plus, I love the web UI. At the time of writing this, I have 12TB of usable space with 3 months of uninterrupted uptime.

CachyOS (arch-based) because I read somewhere it was good for gaming on recent rigs (supposedly pre-optimized stuff that I'll probably never learn about).

So far so good, it's been an almost "everything works out of the box" experience.

Had mainly used debian and arch before that.

Opensuse micro, I also run Nixos but opensuse does a really good job at using containers easily with distrobox

Talking about unpopular, I have just created fork of the project Greybeard (MicroOS+Sway) called “Moldavite” (meteorite induced explosion near Nürnberg caused a lot of gems falling on the ground in Bohemia, if it is not a symbol of the cooperation inside of SUSE, then I don’t know what would be ;)). The main project site is https://sr.ht/~mcepl/moldavite/ and OBS project is https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/home:mcepl:moldavite . Whereas, as I understand it, Greybeard is at least for the moment more or less on the back burner, I hope to continue to work on this.

Idk how popular it is, especially since it's Arch based, but went with EndeavorOS after not running Linux for a few years -- work machine mandated Windows and gaming compatibility was kinda sketch at the time. Heard Gaming compatibility had improved (it has) so wanted to try it out again.

Not afraid of troubleshooting issues I cause, and bleeding edge shenanigans, but a proper Arch install from scratch was still a bit daunting. So it seemed like a good middle ground, and access to the AUR sounded nice.

Been running it with KDE Plasma for a while, been going great! Some issues with Nvidia drivers here and there but hopefully going to upgrade and swap to AMD at some point.

Same similar story but was running Manjaro beforehand. Liking EndeavourOS so for as well!

Did have a Grub issue but after a day of what I call "constructive troubleshooting / learning", was able to rescue my installation.

Just got to have the drive to learn sometimes

Yeah I had one of those moments when an update totally broke stuff. Like, couldn't boot at all. Had to boot into the USB and chroot to reinstall some drivers. Was a fun learning experience lol

May I ask what spurred you to jump from Manjaro to EndeavourOS?

No particular reason, honestly. Ran Manjaro for ~4 years and just wanted something new. A lot of trial and error installing and just wanted a fresh start with the additional knowledge that I had gained over the years.

Idk if this counts but I found my home in a less popular distro, kind of.

I'd tried a few back in the early '00s. While my friends were experimenting with drugs and shit, I was experimenting with Linux distros and virtual machines lmao.

I started with Suse. I'm not too sure what made me switch or where I heard about this one from, but I eventually moved on to Mepis. It was originally rooted in Debian, then moved to Ubuntu before being discontinued.

My good friend at the time was big into Debian. I felt like pure Debian was too much for me to take on as a noob, but I wanted to be able to reach out to him for help now and again when I needed it. Switching to Mepis was pretty much a no-brainer. It was easy enough to get accustomed with. I was still mostly a Windows user, so the transition to KDE was simple. I'm old enough to remember the days of DOS so bumping around a CLI was also not that big of a deal.

The hardest parts were understanding how to install software (the concept of the repository was new to me), and the basic terminal commands. From there I was mostly good.

I remember when Mepis moved to Ubuntu, there were a lot of groans - myself included. But ironically, I've been a pretty much dedicated to Ubuntu for my linux stuff for ages. These days I'm running it with i3wm and I have no major complaints.

To be completely honest, though, I still don't really fully understand the standard file layout... I get it conceptually, but then stuff gets so fragmented - binary files in usr instead of bin, how to track where installed stuff ends up, etc.

I'll figure it out one day, when I really need to... But that time hasn't come yet. A quick find in the terminal always gets me what I need.

Can't believe I'm the first one to come in with Guix System!! I like it because, just like NixOS, it's immutable, declarative and pure. I also dig that everything is written in Guile Scheme, a full-fat programming language. You don't need to know the language exhaustively to get started. There's some wonderful folks in the community though it's a bit spread out since not everyone wants to chat on IRC and mailing lists.

The Guix sublemmy.

I’m curious if anyone dailies Alpine for desktop use. (I don’t.)

Saw at least 2 people who do in the comments.

I have before. I liked it broadly, but could not fix issues with artifacting while playing video in Firefox. It's a small issue, but enough to make me go back to Arch and/or Debian.

NixOS. Nothing better for a server

Nix confuses my monkey brain but every once and I while I try it again. One day it'll click for me

The way I can dumb it down the most without being too wrong...

With most other distros (imperative) things are installed and configured in a way where you have to follow the recipe with all the steps to get to the end result - run installers, or do things manually or write/run scripts, tweak config files, etc.

The Nix/NixOS way is declarative, more akin to an ingredient list, a description of what your system should look like. Nix takes care of doing the legwork. The same config should always build the same system.

My ELI5 way of understanding it is:

With Nix you write a checklist and it just does what you tell it to, settings, drivers, packages, apps, etc.

Other distros are like doing all the things yourself. You'll never do it exactly the same twice.

I've read that a lot and I always think I understand it until it's time to put it into practice

Declarative vs. imperative does require a large paradigm shift for sure. I've used some of these provisioning tools before, but I'm still very much a noob with NixOS. They go further than what I said, they have their own abstractions on top.

I'm a Slackware user, it does what I need without interfering and I can customize everything to my needs, no need to be forced to use systemd dbus pulseaudio and all those stuff.

I used SlackWare a long time ago but the lack of package management for clean uninstalling and upgrading turned me off. No idea if that's still a thing.

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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!

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 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. :-)

Manjaro.

I wanted a rolling distro that had up to date software because I got tired of Ubuntu's 6 month upgrade cycle. But I also didn't want to deal with source packages because I value my time.

Don't get me wrong, I still use Xubuntu, CentOS and RHEL at work, but for my home system I want something that does not give me any major problems so I can unwind after work.

I know about the issues with the site certificates and sometimes the package certificates. He who never messed up big time can cast the first stone.

Manjaro has been on my games machine for nearly 3 years and it has been a smooth experience.

Manjaro is pretty good, but how is it a less popular distro?

It gets a lot of hate round here, because it can be finicky. So in that sense it's unpopular. I also tried to install it once but quickly got fed up.

The intention of this post was probably to find new distros that not many people have heard of.

Manjaro is one of the most popular (well known) distros especially for gaming. Not complaining though; some people think that your device will self destruct if you install Manjaro, so I don't mind people showing their good experiences with it.

I first tried Centos because I knew it. Was horrible as a workstation.

I tried installing Mint but for reason the installer just did not work. A coworker (who was in Arch at the time) suggested I try Manjaro and have loved it even since.

Not my daily but I carry around a usb with slax linux as a portable work environment as well as a recovery tool.

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

Back in the day I used some smaller distros. Sabayon and Archbang both come to mind.

I remember Sabayon with it's gamer-oriented graphics and logo :)

I'm on Garuda, primarily becausei built a new machine with a (then) bleeding edge GPU, so I needed something rolling release that could make use of it. I tried a few others, including Endeavour and Nobara, but Garuda got me farthest along on its own.

Don't know if this counts - used Fedora KDE for about a decade and then last year moved to Fedora Kinoite. It's essentially the same, but is OSTree based and immutable. I like the solid base, the rebasing function and containers

I've been daily driving Fedora KDE as well I was interested in trying kinoite also but have not yet. Is it worth it?

Sorry I didn't see a notification for this.

It's a different work flow installing software. Flatpak first mentality, then install stuff in a Toolbox container, if that doesn't work layer the rpm.

Being able to rebase has been helpful, I've based forward to rawhide a few times to try new packages and then rebase back to stable.

You lose things like being able to use packages out of copr, but used to only really use that to test new versions of KDE. However the devs created a branch for KDE testing anyway, so nothing lost.

Happy to answer any specific questions you might have

Thanks . I think that is helpful. I think I will start in a vm first. Looks like dual boot is broken.

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.

Artix, YouTube "influences". Still maybe will transfer over to mainline Arch to avoid having to go crazy anytime something requires systemd

Artix Linux (w/ Runit) & Void Linux. Interestingly although I started using Linux from Jan 2022, I have used these 2 distros 95% of that time. The rest 5% being Endeavour OS on which I started my journey into Linux.

Due to older hardware and my natural curiousity to learn more about the System. I switched to Artix very early into Linux. The Runit Init system and the fact I chose a base iso (i.e. everything in the system apart from the Core was hand picked and configured by me) made my PC very fast and flexible. I found it quite inconvenient to work and learn w/ and in EndeavourOS. Artix provided me that canvas and it helped me a lot. One possible future con might be that I find it a bit more effort to troubleshoot more popular Distros, in case I need to, because I rarely use non-tui or non-cli programs and I have never worked on Systemd. Fortunately there are always the Arch Wiki or the Program Manuals.

I switched to Void Linux from Artix because Artx, being Arch-Based was a bit unstable whereas Void is a stable-rolling release, sort of like a middle ground between Debian and Arch and so it fits my dynamic. Otherwise it is as good as Artix in other cases.

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

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.

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.

TuxedoOS

It's just so nice with my tuxedo laptop and made me love Plasma.

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.

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.

Solus

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.

Is budgie still being developed?

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've started playing with Chimera Linux. Super interesting hybrid between BSD-like systems (ports, BSD-derived userland tools) and the Linux kernel, with neat design choices like LLVM compiler instead of gcc and musl C instead of glibc. I think of it as a next-gen Void Linux.

raspberry pi os + Debian Sid. Been using the same install with daily updates for 3 yrs.

Why are people still using anything other than Debian and Redhat tho?

Arch and its derivatives (and once, NixOS) are the only distros that provide me with the range of software I need. But guess what? NixOS has some issues if you don't want to go deep into it, and for me they mostly stemmed from the immutability of it. And Arch and derivatives are all rolling release, when I don't want a rolling release. I want a machine I can keep running for 10-15 days or more and not have to bother with the idea of updates.

"for me they mostly stemmed from the immutability of it" 😱 😱 someone saying that immutably OSes are crap. I can't believe what I'm reading 😂 Related discussion: https://lemmy.world/comment/4571828

For some things, they suck. Even NixOS, with its incredible flexibility compared to something like Silverblue, sucks for some things. For example, a Linux-only piece of software I need for University. The supported way to install it, is to download the archive from the university website and unpack it into your root directory, where it will install itself and its dependencies under /usr. You can't exactly do that on an Immutable distro. And I tried to make it work locally, but then in the end, after it didn't, I just gave up.

I just like the rolling release/quick updates of Endeavour(Arch) and SUSE Tumbleweed. So those are the ones I pick between for my gaming laptop (both with Btrfs for easy rollback though I've never needed it). For my servers I use Debian and Ubuntu.

Here is the thing, I used to think in the same way you do, but then Flatpak happened and that kind of delivers the best of both worlds on Debian. Rock solid and stable base OS with the latest apps with Flatpak. Bonus feature, doesn't pollute the system.

ARCH BTW

Ok so it's hardly a small distro anymore I guess. It used to be small.

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