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.
I use Ubuntu, which is apparently the least popular distro around.
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
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.
Very well written. Makes me wanna try out void again (although I am very fine with debian)
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's the WM or DE plus the individual programs. An i3 install with the same dofiles will have the same aesthetics on each distro.
I switched from Arch Linux to Artix Linux to test a distribution without systemd. For now, it works pretty good and I do like.
Advantages... I don't see many, as systemd also runs pretty fast, I don't notice some extra seconds or milliseconds. I think the only thing I could like about not using systemd is that now I have more UNIX style RC, and the fallback DNS isn't set to Cloudflare by default. A part of that I had some issues I needed to fix, but I also enjoy learning new stuff so isn't an issue for me, I do like.
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.
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.
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.
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.
