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’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.
I’ve used alpine a lot on my laptop, though it’s currently been relegated to my home server only. It’s a great distro, if you can live with it’s limitations. Stable, fast, compact and has a great package manage.
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.
ARCH BTW
Ok so it’s hardly a small distro anymore I guess. It used to be small.
