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 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.
I probably should try NixOS, but I’m tempted by BlendOS
Declarative system configuration is the killer feature of NiOS. Atomic rollbacks too. Versioning the whole mess in Git, too.
I’d say nix is hardly niche at this point (although I’m biased cause I use it a ton)
There’s even a termux fork these days that runs nix on droid
Not sure if niche, but I use Arco Linux instead of the alternatives like Endeavour, Manjaro, or plain arch.
Why? Its easier to setup than straight Arch. Manjaro was all over the place when I tried it a few years back. Arco, right from the ISO stage, let’s you configure exactly what you want, with a handy guide on their website.
But the thing that keeps me loyal is the excellent community. The maintainer himself responds to most of your queries on telegram / discord (not FOSS reeee) and he’s very active on YouTube as well with no nonsense guides and walkthroughs. Shoutout Eric Dubois
I use Linux since 1999 and I’m with you, I don’t like niche distros. I like them to be well supported with many devs in them, and a structure around them. My days of tinkering died already in 2002 (I’m looking at you Gentoo and sia). Since then, I want things to work the way I expect them. That’s why I now use Debian or Mint.
Same. I started off on Gentoo, jumped to Puppy, jumped to Slack, jumped to Fedora, jumped to Arch, jumped to Nix, jumped to Guix, jumped back to Arch, and now I’m thinking Debian is the only true stable upstream linux needs.
Plus I’m sick of tweaking my configs for the N’th time to work on the M’th system. To quote a random side-character in American Dad: “I have painted my children for the last time.”
(I will at some point start playing with BSD’s though, I just know it. And Haiku too once they have decent laptop support.)
Gentoo linux, the main reason is ive tried many distros, which to alot of there credit worked pretty well for 99% of stuff. But like for example bazzite somthing broke upstream to where because of how OCI works and it layers systems. It takes Silverblue and adds alot of packages to become Bazzite and then my repo stripped out stuff i didnt want. But it became A NIGHTMARE when your builds fail and you cant figure out why. And its because of somthing upstream. And you cannot build/update because upstream brokey. And like with NixOS which i still daily on my main rig, but gentoo on everything else. Is really powerful but the immutability gets in your way for some things and it takes alot of time to adapt scripts or troubleshoot. So i ended up installing gentoo on my other computers because they do simple tasks, i dont half to worry about breakage because of snapper and stable channel (at least on the NAS) And its alot of fun to turn a live CD into a OS that has only what you want in it. SystemD or OpenRC, hardened toolchains or normal? And distcc and binhost are S tier
I use guix because, while it has a small community, the packaging language is one of the easiest I’ve ever used.
Every distro I’ve tried I’ve always run into having to wait on packages or support from someone else. The package transformation scheme like what nixos has is great but Nixlang sucks ass. Being able to do all that in lisp is much preferred.
Plus I like shepherd much more than any of the other process 0’s
I too prefer big distros, but niche distros are usually big distros with small tweaks in the default config or installed packages. It’s Debian/Fedora/Arch slightly tweaked.
It’s like Linux From Scratch… with friends. Every distro has a purpose. I haven’t done super niche. One day I’ll probably try to run Gentoo much more seriously, and maybe an LFS just to see if I can.
Linux is the realm of all computer science students when it comes time to learn about operating systems, processes, threading, interrupts, schedulers, memory, etc. All levels exist in this space. The major distros all have underlying reasons they exist too. It is not branding/marketing like much of the consumer world.
I’m using Dietpi on my Orange pi zero 3. Aaaaaand because I’m (pretty much) forced to.
Because Hyprland Arch is the Bees Knees
I use Arkane Linux, which is based on Arch but is immutable. Every update is a new install. You can easily configure custom images to deploy for your specific wants or needs. It’s nice for keeping up to date with Arch while keeping how my machine is configured declared in an image. You can always roll back if something was wrong with the image you deployed too.
