I occasionally see love for niche small distros, instead of the major ones…
And it just seems to me like there’s more hurdles than help when it comes to adopting an OS whose users number in the hundreds or dozens. I can understand trying one for fun in a VM, but I prefer sticking to the bigger distros for my daily drivers since the they’ll support more software and not be reliant on upstream sources, and any bugs or other issues are more likely to be documented abd have workarounds/fixes.
So: What distro do you daily drive and why? What drove you to choose it?
I shouldn’t talk because I dip in and out, but I do that because I like the possibilities. Like, what if someone comes up with a concept, but no one tries it, and it turns out to really work? Like, I like immutability as a concept, so I’ve tried Silverblue, Kinoite, and Bazzite. If nobody gave it a go, then the concept would die on the vine.
Also, I like seeing different ways of thinking about technology.
void boots fast on rather old or very low powered copmuters :3
Also on modern firebreathers.
I like runit better than systemd, the packages are current, and it has most of what I want in the main repos.
I also found the documentation excellent in thst it’s a cohesive list of real-world topics rather than a 500-km-deep wiki or forum archive.
I should try a modern Slackware one day. I loved it back before I had broadband and just ordered a burned CD for each new release, but I should try following -current and the Slackbuilds stuff.
Slackbuilds are really nice. Sbopkg lets you download queue files for each program, then automatically install necessary dependencies in the correct order, no matter if they’re available as packages or from source. Unfortunately, Slackware is so bare-bones out of the box that there are still pitfalls. For example, LibreOffice depends on avahi. And to successfully install that, you first need to create an avahi user and group, then install avahi, then write an init script that starts the avahi daemon and another one to stop it on shutdown.
-Current is much too active for my personal taste. I run Slackware because I’m a lazy Slacker.
The laziest approach to Slacking today is to install the default full install, then do:
wget https://github.com/sbopkg/sbopkg/releases/download/0.38.2/sbopkg-0.38.2-noarch-1_wsr.tgz #Download the Slackbuilds helper Sbopkg
slackpkg install sbopkg-0.38.2-noarch-1_wsr.tgz #Install it
sbopkg -r #Sync its local repository to Slackbuilds
sqg -a #Build queue files (dependency info) for the repository
sbopkg -i flatpak #Install Flatpak and its dependencies
flatpak remote-add --user flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo #Add the Flathub repo
I really like immutable distros, and am currently using NixOS. I feel like despite still being relatively obscure, NixOS is a bit of an outlier since it has more packages than any other distro and is (so far) the only distro I’ve used that has never broken. There is a steep learning curve, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for non programmers, but it is something truly different than all mainstream Linux distros while being extremely reliable.
Repology artificially reduces the number of packages instead of reporting the actual number. Which I find highly dubious because most packages have a purpose. In particular for repositories like the AUR artificially eliminating packages goes against everything it stands for. Yes it’s supposed to have alternative versions of something, that’s the whole point.
If there wasn’t for this the ranking would be very different. Debian for example maintains over 200k packages in unstable.
I’m using RebeccaBlackOS because it finally utilizes Wayland’s capabilities fully.
The distros are very different. HM is just Ubuntu with a theme.
RB is, to my knowledge, the only distro built around Weston, Wayland’s reference compositor. It doesn’t include any Rebecca Black theming, it’s just called that cause the distro’s maintainer is a fan of hers.
Just saying, I’ve never had a virus with Temple OS.
