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.
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
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.
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
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.
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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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 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?
Arkane Linux. The argument for using a more stable base for an immutable system is that you can get all the updated libraries and things you need by running things as flatpaks or in distrobox.
But I’ve always wanted an immutable Arch because if something breaks, you just roll back without having to use Snapper or anything like that. Think maintenance free Arch where you can even autoupdate without much worry.
Rolling your own arch images is made easier too, so you can do all the customization you want, but as a base part of your system instead of packages installed after the fact.
That said, I still run Ublue variants on all my devices with Arch containers. But I hope this project sees steady momentum.
That sounds like BlendOS. I haven’t tried either of them, but sounds really cool!
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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.
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?
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.
Makes sense. Thanks for the info!
Not to be confused with ChimeraOS
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.
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.
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
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)
I have HoloISO running around on mini PCs because they just work as remote steam machines, can play games in their own right, and I can use them as media boxes if I want. I don’t necessarily recommend it, but it was super easy to install and configure except for the Bluetooth issue that cropped up occasionally where I had to unload and reload the Bluetooth module. Now I just have a script that automatically does that on boot because I can’t give a shit about fixing it.
I also have a couple of Slax USBs running around. They used to be relatively popular with folks who fixed computers. I like building from modules and I’m familiar with Slackware so it was a good fit for a live environment.
Not gonna lie, I thought elementaryOS was gonna take off and I guess it never did. I used it on my school laptop when I was in college for most of the time there. It was fine but mostly just a sleaker looking Mint basically.
TAILS for security
