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!
Void Linux! It’s a very simple, completely independently distro without a dependence on a corporate funded project. It uses runit in place of systemd (I don’t mind systemd but it seems a lot of people just like runit better for being smaller, neater, and very reliable, which is cool)
It has a “stable rolling release” update model and provides vanilla packages. And the package manager xbps can install pre-compiled binaries or function more like portage or BSDs ports system for building from source (full disclosure, I’ve never used any of those nor the functionality in xbps so I don’t understand it super well). Oh and the community is helpful, and the documentation is pretty strong and doesn’t always just give you commands to run blindly (as someone who is trying to get more confident in the terminal I find that helpful)
The project has a very “less is more” philosophy which I really appreciate.
My one disappointment is that there isn’t a package kit implementation for xbps so I can’t use the graphical software store provided by my desktop environment :(
I wanted to try Void but I had trouble getting it to work with encrypting the root partition, despite following some of the guides I found. If I could get that to work and from there get an atomic setup for backups, I’d probably use it on a few machines.
I like the philosophy and honestly would prefer to not have systemd or other massive dependencies. I’m part of the problem though because I am using Fedora now.
I am also a Void user, but will agree that the installation process can be very difficult, especially if you want to set up encryption in ways the standard installer does not support. You have to install it into a chroot (which I believe is how Debian was installed 20+ years ago).
That said, it is a great learning process and really helps you appreciate how awesome xbps is as a package manager!
Is it void thats builds everything from source? Do u need to compile ur own kernal?
I believe you’re thinking of Gentoo. But it seems that you can get precompiled kernels in Gentoo these days.
Artix Linux. Basically Arch without systemd. It has four options for alternative init systems, so you get to see how it compared to systemd (ultimately it shows how a more minimal init approach is all you need in place of systemd, and where systemd has stepped outside of init into what should be part of the OS space, like elogind, etc.)
The Artix team have done an amazing job of writing various init scripts to keep the distro comparable with Arch, have written alternatives to systemd modules, like replacing elogind with their own implementation, seatd, and IMHO is the defacto standard for how you implement a non systemd distro.
Working without systemd, even if you like it from a sys admin standpoint, teaches you what you lose without systemd, which for the average user isn’t much. I game, code, administer web servers, etc., all without missing a beat on Artix Linux, and it honestly has taught me so much about Linux after I switched from Arch.
I would consider jumping to Gentoo or Void out of curiosity, but Artix is where I’ll be staying for the foreseeable future.
I’ve been kinda curious about Artix. I wouldn’t say I hate systemd, but I’ve been minorly annoyed by it and might want something more minimal.
What is the software situation like? The AUR probably doesn’t work reliably, right?
Yeah I’m someone who thinks systemd is pretty good, but I still avoid it on personal machines just because I think it’s level of market penetration creates a dangerous monoculture.
+1. systemd is something the Linux ecosystem really needs, but its execution is abysmal. We should be designing around standards so the best product can win. We should not be designing around singular implementations that could make it easy for Red Hat to execute a EEE strategy to consolidate Linux on the workstation.
I can’t wait till a crowdstrike-like flaw is exposed in systemd so we can all see how terrible^W wonderful monocultures can be.
I use the AUR all the time, the only thing I have to do is look for systemd as a dependency and avoid that.
The Artix team generally provides init scripts for commonly used packages that rely on init. So for example, if you want to install openvpn, you’d have to install it alongside its script so:
sudo pacman -S openvpn openvpn-runit
Installs the runit init script. It does let you know that (for runit) to initialize it you have to create a soft link to the service directory so after installation:
sudo ln -s /etc/runit/sv/openvpn /run/runit/service/
And then initialize using runit’s service manager, sv:
sudo sv start openvpn
Anyways, that’s just one instance. I have only had one issue where I had to heavily troubleshoot for an obscure piece of software that relied on systemd as a dependency and there wasn’t any alternative…so I simply modified the source code, recompiled the binary and did it myself. But I’ve been using Artix for nearly 5 years and that is one out of thousands of packages.
Fedora Kinoite: the most stable update and package mechanism there is.
Even though the packages are really new, it is still stable and you always have a rollback.
Even more, you can reset the system, and we are experimenting with factory resetting too. Resetting means as long as your system has some bootable backup, you can get back to 100% vanilla but current version, without reinstalling.
Fedora Kinoite NixOS: the most stable update and package mechanism there is.
Even though the packages are really new, it is still stable and you always have a rollback.
And it’s declarative.
It’s funny, you could take the text you wrote for Kinoite and it’s aplicable to pretty much any atomic distro, regardrdless of how it implements that atomicity(if that’s a word).
SnowflakeOS.
Based on NixOS, its goal is to be more user-accessible than NixOS, shrinking that learning curve, and still being just as declarative and stable.
It’s still in Alpha, though, so not yet ready for the aforementioned users.
its goal is to be more user-accessible than NixOS
How does it attempt to do that? I assume it doesn’t change Nix. Does it hide the configuration behind GUIs?
Slackware!
“But it has no dependency resolution.”
It does, but it’s optional. And it really isn’t an issue like you’d think coming from other distros. It uses a completely different paradigm: You don’t have to care about dependencies at all, cause you already have all of them taken care of after a default install.
It comes with batteries, meaning the default install includes everything you need for general computing. It’s the Anti-Arch. You don’t have to install a DE, your editor of choice, an office suite, TeX environment, image editing software, or configure a LAMP stack. You already have it. Granted, it works best if the default software selection suites you, and it’s a bit unconventional.
But in case you do need more, Slackbuilds are there for you, which work very similar to Arch’s AUR.
Also, it follows the KISS philosophy to the letter. It’s basically just a distribution of software in the classical sense, plus some bash scripts written by the benevolent dictator Patrick Volkerding himself.
Newcomers will often be put off cause the online documentation is very lacking and outdated. But again, Slackware is different. Documentation is included in the form of easy-to-understand and descriptive text files, which are also written by Pat himself, and are found right where you’d be in the filesystem when you need them. For more specific stuff, ask on linuxquestions.org, where, again, Pat is actively posting.
It’s not for everyone, or even for many people, but IMO still fills a niche for people who want a system that is as simple as Arch, as stable as Debian, and a blast from the past of Linux (without the hardware issues).
There’s a “Slack” way to do things, and once you get it, the distro becomes the easiest to maintain of them all. Cause almost literally nothing ever changes.
