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.
Yeah ur right. Whata voids gimmick
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.
We should not be designing around singular implementations
Like Linux?
I’m not sure what you mean when suggesting Linux is a singular implementation around which features are exclusively designed. There’s all kinds of software that runs on all kinds of different OSes. Userspace applications, for example, can take advantage of POSIX compatibility to ensure that they run on all platforms (Linux, BSDs, even Windows).
Does systemd have any similar sort of compatibility guarantee? Can I run systemd-whateverd on BSD? Can I run systemd itself on BSD? I’m pretty sure most other init systems support at least one other OS if not more. Would the maintainers even support merging patches that do this? What about musl?
This kind of happened with the
xz
hack already. I didn’t look into it heavily, so this is anecdotal, but accordingly thexz
hack relied on systemd to execute the backdoor, so if you didn’t have systemd on your machine, the backdoor was essentially inert.That’s not at all the conclusion you should draw. xz was linked into systemd but that was just a convenient target. Once xz was compromised it could have targeted literally anything that loaded it. Your only real defence would have been not to install it at all.
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.
Oh okay, that actually doesn’t sound too bad. I’ll definitely consider it for my next install.
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 KinoiteNixOS: 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.
Fedora Kinoite is usable ;)
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).
Depending if you just mean all the Fedora Forks or really all the other implementations (Android, ChromeOS, SteamOS, VanillaOS, microOS/Aeon XeniaOS (?)) afaik Fedora Atomic is the best.
This does not apply to OpenSUSE microOS for example, where there is no reset capability.
And the lack of either using ostree (which is like git) or chunked container images, makes the updates still package based and more prone to breaking.
Kinda crazy that I’m running NixOS on 3 boxes…
How do I get anything done?
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?
Yes, the goal is to GUI-fy as much as possible. Given that there’s some common tasks that everybody does the same way (like adding the
nix-command
andflake
support) or adding software packages, seems reasonable to make easy-mode for those kinds of things.
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.Void Linux. It’s simple, lightweight (the base system doesn’t come with much, only an installer you run from a TTY interface), and I like its package tree/templates system. Contributing to packages is pretty straightforward, however you need to be patient, as maintainers aren’t as available as the ones from other (more popular) communities. Their IRC channel on Libera is also pretty helpful, when you run into problems.
I liked the install process for Void. I had a live USB and there were instructions to partition, install packages, and chroot. I could tell how it was getting set up and felt like I could easily make modifications to the install process if I wanted.
NixOS:
- Largest and most up to date package repository (no need for flatpack/appimage/snap ect)
- Reproducible
- Declarative
- Rollbacks you can select at boot time
- No dependency conflicts
I think it will easily be the number 1 distro if/when they can :
- the steep learning curve (e.g. have a gui installer EDIT: As in a GUI software centre)
- documentation
- have more tools use nixos and have nixos in mind (e.g. there are a couple of tools that didn’t work for me because of specific C libraries not beeing present/configured on nixos that are present on other distros. some libraries implicitly expect these to be present).
I really like how configurable NixOS is, but that learning curve is immense when you need to install something unique that doesn’t already have a package or flake.
e.g. have a gui installer
I assume you mean a GUI for editing configuration.nix? Because the initial NixOS install is GUI-based.
yep, I mean a GUI based software centre
no need for flatpack/appimage/snap ect
No matter how large their repo is you’re always going to find some software they haven’t packaged. Trying to convince the entire world to use your repo isn’t scalable.
Yeah I agree, I am sure they are missing some obscure stuff. But in practise it has everything that I use and there has been no need for me to touch flatpak/appimage/snap
Not exactly Linux, but Haiku. Been rooting for them for years. Because I used BeOS and I must admit, it was light years ahead of the rest. Haiku though does not seem to be doing too well.
Chimera Linux (not to be confused with ChimeraOS, a variant of SteamOS). It introduces itself like this:
Chimera is an independent, general-purpose, rolling-release Linux distribution developed from scratch. It utilizes a FreeBSD-based userland, musl C library and the LLVM toolchain, along with the dinit service manager. Its primary focus is correctness, consistency and simplicity, but not at the expense of feature set; its primary desktop environment is GNOME
It’s worth mentioning that it’s a Linux without GNU (though not for the sake of being that). In general I think projects like this one has a value from a ecosystem diversity perspective too, which also has become immediately apparent when Chimera Linux wasn’t hit by the two last security issues I learned about (the recent SSH regression and the xz debacle).
I’m particularly impressed with their relatively lean setup, but I haven’t had opportunity to use it yet. It’s a bit too immature for my desktop use and I’m already happy with the server I have so it makes no sense to switch.
May as well contribute my own 😜.
I’m an absolute sucker for exquisitely hardened distros. Hence, distros like Qubes OS and Kicksecure have rightfully caught my interest. However, the former’s hardware requirements are too harsh on the devices I currently own. While the latter relies on backports for security updates; which I’m not a fan of. Thankfully, there is also secureblue.
Contrary to the others, secureblue is built on top of an ‘immutable’ and/or atomic base distro; namely Fedora Atomic. By which:
- It’s protected against certain attacks.
- Enables it to benefit from more recent advancements and developments that benefit security without foregoing robustness.
If security is your top priority, Qubes OS is the gold standard. However, secureblue is a decent (albeit inferior) alternative if you prefer current and/or ‘immutable’/atomic distros.
I wonder what happened to Tails - the one that started it all.
TIL that Tails predates all the distros mentioned in my earlier comment and it also predates Whonix. So thank you for mentioning that! (It’s by about 3 years if anyone is wondering; Tails in 2009; Kicksecure, Qubes OS and Whonix in 2012; secureblue in 2023.)
So, the reason I didn’t even mention Tails, is because I (frankly) don’t regard it as a daily driver meant for general use. However, I might be completely wrong on this. So please feel free to correct me.
However, even if Tails would be excellent as a daily driver, the problem related to reliance on backports for security updates still persists. Furthermore, while its protection against forensics is arguably superior to anything else out there (including Qubes OS), its overall security model is not something special. Even if -for the sake of argument- we’d regard its security superior over both Kicksecure and secureblue, it still wouldn’t make a chance against Qubes OS’ security model.
https://garudalinux.org/ , based on archlinux with calamares installer and optimized binary packages, plus zstd-compressed btrfs and snapper (easy rollbacks for updates from grub items). And many other thingys. Oh, and as default kde theme a fork of my favorite, Sweet.
It also uses zram, doesn’t it?
Yes! It has many other niceties I didn’t mention, they’re all listed in their website.
Funtoo sounds interesting but I haven’t tried it.
I do recommend Gentoo (haven’t tried Funtoo) for the academically inclined. It’s a beast to maintain, but you’ll soon find yourself at ease with configuring and compiling your own kernel, configuring your packages and even making some yourself.
It isn’t as hard as people make it out to be - if you gradually push your boundaries. In particular, it’s good if you already use Arch.
Arch stumped me. But this was nearly a decade ago though. I know more and maybe the getting started guide has improved.
Arch guide expanded in scope IMO. The choices are way more than in the past. However, it’s good quality and easy to read. I implore you to skim it, even if you don’t try it out.
Thanks, I’ll keep it in mind. Stuff like Arch, Gentoo, and even Linux From Scratch is still very fascinating to me.
Fedora and Debian
Exotic/niche