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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I use Slackware, which is so unpopular it doesn’t even show up in this thread, yet.
What made me choose it is the fact that it hardly ever changes, at all. It’s a bit weird to set up at first, but all knowledge gained about it will stay relevant for a very long time. Also, it is a real general purpose distro, so I can use it on my gaming PC, laptop and server.
Debian would probably be a better choice when I just take practicability into account, but I like Slackware’s philosophy, and running a system that forces me to learn it inside out. Arch is too bleeding edge for me.
I would love to use Slackware as a daily driver, but no package management OOTB makes me feel I am not worthy of using it. I believe third-party tools exist, so maybe I will use it at some point, but perhaps I’d be better served with Void for now
In practice, Slackware package management after installation works like Arch’s AUR.
You install (or build) packages from a community-maintained repo and are officially supposed to do it manually and always read the build scripts and READMEs, but a helper with dependency resolution (slpkg) exists, works well and most people use it.
