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!

    • mariusafa@lemmy.sdf.org
      4·
      4 months ago

      The guix manual is pretty well explained. Now i’m learning Guile (Scheme’s dialog) and learning to configure both guix and guix system.

      The fact of being able to revert system and home environment software installation and configuration without breaking anything, is too good to be true.

      It’s also very cool to define packages either as compiled software or source packages to compile.

    • hitwright@lemmy.world
      2·
      4 months ago

      Since there are not many developers there are some build systems that are more prioritized than others. If you come from emacs side of things, it’s great. Rust is around 4 versions older. And the single developer recently burned out. The package manager is a lot like nixos, so every package requires work to introduce to the system.

        • Laser
          3·
          4 months ago

          The NixOS ecosystem while maybe sometimes both chaotic and heavily centralized just seems miles ahead of what Guix System has to offer unfortunately; nix is a weird language (I’m not qualified to rate it but people have called it a bad DSL), but it does the job, and there were some factors that ruled out Guix System for me. Secure Boot support was one of them, which NixOS doesn’t support “natively”, but there is Lanzaboote. For better or for worse this kind of forced me to look into flakes very early.

        • hitwright@lemmy.world
          2·
          4 months ago

          Thanks for the info, although versioning afaik not the thing that keeps it behind. There are tools to import the necessary packages with ‘guix import crate’. It automatically selects the necessary packages.

          Difficulties arise when Cargo.toml for example uses git as source. Then you have to pull and write specifications for not a standard package. The build system is isolated and cannot download anything off the internet.

          • iopq@lemmy.world
            3·
            4 months ago

            So what nix does is it hashes the inputs, so git still works even immutably if the hash matches

            • hitwright@lemmy.world
              2·
              4 months ago

              Does nix require the exact commit be written out for the package, or does it generate a hash during the build taking the newest git commit?