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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Devuan - it’s like debian, but without systemd.
Three days and nobody mentioned TempleOS? If attempting to build The Third Temple in the form of an OS isn’t niche and exotic, I don’t know what is. 🤣
For anyone unfamliar:
TempleOS (formerly J Operating System, LoseThos, and SparrowOS) is a biblical-themed lightweight operating system (OS) designed to be the Third Temple prophesied in the Bible. It was created by American programmer Terry A. Davis, who developed it alone over the course of a decade after a series of manic episodes that he later described as a revelation from God.
Davis began developing TempleOS circa 2003. One of its early names was the “J Operating System” before renaming it to “LoseThos”, a reference to a scene from the 1986 film Platoon. In 2008, Davis wrote that LoseThos was “primarily for making video games. It has no networking or Internet support. As far as I’m concerned, that would be reinventing the wheel”. Another name he used was “SparrowOS” before settling on “TempleOS”. In mid-2013, his website announced: “God’s temple is finished. Now, God kills CIA until it spreads [sic].”
Davis died after being hit by a train on August 11, 2018.
TempleOS was written in a programming language developed by Davis as a middle ground between C and C++, originally called “C+” (C Plus), later renamed to “Holy C”, possibly a reference to the Holy See. It doubles as the shell language, enabling the writing and execution of entire applications from within the shell. The IDE that comes with TempleOS supports several features, such as embedding images in code. It uses a non-standard text format (known as DolDoc) which has support for hypertext links, images, and 3D meshes to be embedded into what are otherwise standard ASCII files; for example, a file can have a spinning 3D model of a tank as a comment in source code. Most code in the OS is JIT-compiled, and it is generally encouraged to use JIT compilation as opposed to creating binaries. Davis ultimately wrote over 100,000 lines of code for the OS.
From Wikipedia
This is at the very least super interesting.
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!
For sure, just without the declarative part. I never heard of this today, so I’ll check it out too. I’ve stayed away from declarative stuff because I don’t have time to learn a whole programming language like with Nix, but its still interesting.
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.
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.
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.
I have a thinkpad that runs this. It’s a great little distro.
TAILS for security
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.
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.
hannah montana, nuff said!
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.
It’s very good for servers. I wouldn’t use it on desktop.
Using it on all my machines (desktop and notebooks), can’t really complain – but then again, couldn’t really complain about Arch either
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Makes sense. Thanks for the info!
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.
Not to be confused with ChimeraOS
Is Bazzite still niche?
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.
That Firefox bug is Mozilla’s fault and happens to anyone on Wayland + Nvidia right now. It’s fixed in the nightly Firefox build. There’s no official flatpaks for the nightly, but you can install it in distrobox and export it.
I recommend hopping in their Discord for help with your game. The devs are always responding to folks in there.
Out of curiosity, what game?
Aerofly 10
The atomicity probably counts as an interesting feature, but it does seem to be getting more popular.
