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!
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That sounds like BlendOS. I haven’t tried either of them, but sounds really cool!
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Haha nice try. If everyone starts liking it then it won’t be niche anymore. So I won’t share it! /s
Is Bazzite still niche?
I installed it on my Desktop, replacing LMDE. Unfortunately I have trouble running the one game that I play even though it works on Linux with Steam. It worked in Linux Mint, but for some reason it won’t start in Bazzite. Surely it’s because I have an Nvidia graphics card, but that wasn’t a problem with Linux Mint.
Another problem that I ran into was Firefox (flatpak) crashing all the time. Luckily you just have to disable wayland using Flatseal, but I still get graphics glitches with it.
I’m thinking of restoring my Linux Mint backup.
I don’t know why I’m responding to your comment, I just wanted to share my experience, I guess.
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Void is my favourite distro, although I haven’t used it for a while. Extremely fast package manager, rolling release but not bleeding edge, super simple, very fun to tinker with (more than Arch imo). I stopped using it because I wanted something more popular for easier troubleshooting. But if I ever get a secondary PC/laptop I’ll probably start using it again.
take a look at Alpine Linux – Alpine, Void, and Gentoo all grew out of a similar “Linux plus BSD” attitude – Alpine’s package manager is as fast or faster than Void’s – Alpine is pretty under-represented (but not absent) on the desktop side of things while being rather over-represented in the container, VM, server side of things (meaning the small community tends to be rather admin heavy)
If that is what you are looking for, try Chimera Linux. It was created by a Void maintainer.
I’m annoyed by these Gnome centered distros. If I had to choose a single DE for a distro, I 'd choose a flexible one that can run on potatoes, such as Xfce. I suppose Xfce as default is a part of the MX linux popularity.
I agree with this. In the case of Chimera Linux, it is a goal of the distro to have “no legacy” and so it is Wayland and Pipewire only from the start. That limited their choices back when they were making the decision.
Xfce is still X only although they are making progress.
Not niche, but surely exotic: NixOS, a distribution that is configured via a purely functional language. There is no such thing as installing or uninstalling packages, you add or remove things from your configuration and then simply apply that configuration.
I really wanted to like NixOS (and I do, theoretically), but I couldn’t dedicate more than 5 full days over Christmas to learn how to get to a working development system.
May I ask what the issue actually was? Was it about “working system” or about “working development system”?
I don’t recall needing more than two days for getting a system up and running for the first time, and in fact it worked so well that I switched all my machines to it by now; granted, I have changed a lot about the configuration ever since and there seem to be a lot of paths to take in the beginning and it’s not always clear which one to take. But getting a working system, even one suited for development (personally, I’d recommend a nix development shell for that), shouldn’t really take that long.
Working development system. I got quite far, but after so much work, became very frustrated when a VSCode plugin wouldn’t work properly because it needed (and assumed) read/write access. I didn’t want to have to manage and think about every little plugin I experimented with at the OS level.
