Who here uses a less popular Linux distribution? What made you choose it?
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.
Parabola GNU/Linux-libre user since its inception more than ten years ago. It Is Arch Linux minus every bit of non-free software, which Is carefully left out.
I’ve started playing with Chimera Linux. Super interesting hybrid between BSD-like systems (ports, BSD-derived userland tools) and the Linux kernel, with neat design choices like LLVM compiler instead of gcc and musl C instead of glibc. I think of it as a next-gen Void Linux.
Can’t believe I’m the first one to come in with Guix System!! I like it because, just like NixOS, it’s immutable, declarative and pure. I also dig that everything is written in Guile Scheme, a full-fat programming language. You don’t need to know the language exhaustively to get started. There’s some wonderful folks in the community though it’s a bit spread out since not everyone wants to chat on IRC and mailing lists.
The way I can dumb it down the most without being too wrong…
With most other distros (imperative) things are installed and configured in a way where you have to follow the recipe with all the steps to get to the end result - run installers, or do things manually or write/run scripts, tweak config files, etc.
The Nix/NixOS way is declarative, more akin to an ingredient list, a description of what your system should look like. Nix takes care of doing the legwork. The same config should always build the same system.
Declarative vs. imperative does require a large paradigm shift for sure. I’ve used some of these provisioning tools before, but I’m still very much a noob with NixOS. They go further than what I said, they have their own abstractions on top.
I use Void Linux. I switched from Arch btw because I liked their package manager, was curious about their init system runit, and still wanted a rolling release. I’ve used it for a little over a year now and overall I’ve been happy.
I was the same but in 2017. Six years later and I’m still using the same Void install. There’s simply no reason for me to switch, it’s perfect and I have my system tailored exactly to my liking at this point.
Happy SteamOS / SteamDeck user here, too. SteamOS would be mainstream in my book. (Nonetheless, Valve did a great job with it, never experienced any problems with it and everything just works.)
Not to diminish what Valve has achieved there (it's an amazing PC/console hybrid, love mine).
But a smooth experience without any hitches is much easier to achieve when your hardware variation basically boils down to "how big is the SSD". The fact that all Steamdecks run the same hardware helps keep things simple.
I guess that's also the reason why they are not (yet?) pushing the new SteamOS as a general-purpose distribution for everyone to use. Doing that would/will require much more manpower.
Funnily enough, I am looking forward to the Apple silicon distributions from Fedora etc., because the lack of hardware variation in the Apple ecosystem helps here, too. :-)
Don’t know if this counts - used Fedora KDE for about a decade and then last year moved to Fedora Kinoite. It’s essentially the same, but is OSTree based and immutable. I like the solid base, the rebasing function and containers
It’s a different work flow installing software. Flatpak first mentality, then install stuff in a Toolbox container, if that doesn’t work layer the rpm.
Being able to rebase has been helpful, I’ve based forward to rawhide a few times to try new packages and then rebase back to stable.
You lose things like being able to use packages out of copr, but used to only really use that to test new versions of KDE. However the devs created a branch for KDE testing anyway, so nothing lost.
Happy to answer any specific questions you might have
I’d be more interested in what obscure text editors, window managers, etc people were using regardless of distro. Distro in my mind is about software release and install philosophy, any distribution that comes with a lot of preinstalled software is generally built on the back of a more skeletal distribution, and is interesting mostly for what software choices it makes.
I used LeftWM for a while, it’s a window manager built in rust. One of the cool things about it was its themes functionality. You put all your dot files in a particular directory for things like your bar, and then you can save and switch multiple themes with a short command. Had some interesting community ones too like one based on the Star Trek TNG computer terminals. Ended up moving away from it after a while because it just didn’t quite feel polished enough for a daily deiver yet and I got a little tired of the constant tweaking
Garuda Linux, if that counts. It’s the best and most beginner friendly arch based distro imho. I need wine-staging and it comes packaged for arch which is very nice since I keep having troubles with it on non arch based disteos. On debian for instance it broke with every update, damn winehq install.
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