Oh jeez. I forgot about that. I had that running on my DS back in the day from a GBA flashcart with a big-ass CompactFlash card sticking out the bottom. Good times.
It's interesting because it's essentially the opposite of the idea behind Linux. Using Linux specifically to censor and spy on people is diabolical, but it makes sense why they chose it.
The idea behind Linux is to create an operating system anyone can use in any way they want.
That includes the North Korean government using it to spy on their people.
Sounds more like a BSD kind of idea, to be honest. The GNU idea is to let specifically end-users have control over their own computer, not some third-party.
The first one that came to mind was fli4l (Floppy ISDN for Linux). Originally a distro of German origin that fit on a single floppy disk to turn a 386 or 486 PC into a router for ISDN connections. Last I looked it's still actively worked on.
There are probably tons of more obsuce ones. But this is one I actually used.
Smoothwall. I used to run it a lot back in the early 2000s for personal use and even helped set up a couple small businesses with it but I don't hear of anyone else using it these days, people seem to love openwrt and pfsense more.
It was great for just taking any old x86 machine and making a powerful, fully featured firewall/router out of it, including a VPN server, all through a web interface. Nowadays that's boring shit but in 2002 it was pretty cool.
they have a wiki with insane nonsens about why they don't package certain things. Example:
pam
Package has different security-issues and is not oriented on the way of technical emancipation as Hyperbola is trying to adapt lightweight implementations.
Wait... they're militant enough about Free Software to refuse to package anything even slightly non-Free, but their "final goal" is to switch the kernel to BSD (i.e. away from copyleft)? WTF?
HyperbolaBSD is under a progressive migration by replacing all non GPL-compatible code. It will be replaced with new compatible code under Simplified BSD License. We do this in order to incorporate GPL code from other projects such as ReactOS, as well new code from scratch.
It's not clear to me that relicensing the existing code to GPL is what they're planning on doing; it sounds more like they're going to mix in GPL code but not change the existing files to GPL en masse after they finish harmonizing them to two-clause BSD.
Frankly, IMO that's too bad: I'd love to see them make the whole shebang GPLv3-or-later
Related question: is all Linux kernel code required to be licensed GPLv2-only, or are individual contributions allowed to be GPLv2-or-later? I'd be nice to see if that project (and stuff like HURD and ReactOS) could benefit from at least some Linux contributions, even if they can't copy it wholesale.
It's an ancient divide in parts of the FOSS community that believes copyleft licenses are not "free" because they force you to license contributions under the same license.
Yes, Hyperbola is very ideological and super strict, but it was always meant to be that way - to provide a system that works in some way and at the same time is as ethical and "clean" as possible. Some people value it over anything, and for them, Hyperbola is a good pick.
you think a distribution that automatically includes all the proprietary stuff that we use baked into the distro would be more popular since it makes linux ready to go for most people; but it still gets fewer than 300 clicks per month.
it's main feature is that it completely redefines the system's root directory structure. the only reason i even know it exists is because i'm friends with one of the creators
Gobo Linux has to have been the distro I was looking forward to most too. I really hope it picks up because it's design philosophies. Absolutely phenomenal.
You may wish to look into NixOS or GNU Guix as taking the same ideas to the logical conclusion, or stal/ix which aspires to take a more traditional approach and in that way is perhaps closer to Gobo. All three are very much alive and actively maintained, even thriving by some metrics.
I much enjoyed it back in the day. Nokia even had their own app store for it and gave a nice financial incentive for the first hundred or thousand apps.
I feel Jolla & SailfishOS is the spiritual successor.
Someone gave me a PowerMac and of course I had to try to run Linux. It was an interesting experience, it would boot to MacOS and then run the Yellow Dog bootloader. Couldn't get it to boot directly. That little experiment showed me how tightly Apple controlled what would run on Apple machines back then.
Well I don’t hear much about Gentoo, Damn Small, Puppy or Knoppix anymore. Wonder if they still exist.
I haven’t done much disto hopping since I settled on Ubuntu around ‘08 and then on NixOS last year. I like my systems working when I need them and waiting around for a new install to finish is boring to me.
Gentoo still exists. Damn Small was dead for a decade but has risen again recently. Puppy is alive and well. Knoppix is still alive, but the last downloadable release is almost 4 years old.
How so? When I switched to NixOs I was looking for system stability over time. That’s not really something I associate with Gentoo, at least not on a desktop system.
They both allow you to deploy and update a highly customized OS across many potentially different machines.
Gentoo has cflags and cross-building
Nix has Nix configs
I somewhat disagree about the stability. Maybe it's no longer the case, but i used gentoo for a few years in the 2010s and it was always stable for me. A buggy upstream release of a package could be a problem in theory, but if that were to happen you can generally roll back the package and mask it from updates for a while. I never ended up needing to do that. However i agree that stability seems to be a high priority for Nix devs.
The instability I had on Gentoo was largely a result of me setting up the system one way, deciding I didn't like it, uninstalling a bunch of stuff poorly and then building something new on top of it. All on the same install. For a little while though, I had a G3 Mac running headless as a small NAS. Never had a issue out of it but then I also never touched it except to update it, when I remembered it existed.
I found that Ubuntu was a more stable base for my mucking about. Then I got my first real job (truck driving) and didn't have time fix my system constantly and learned to just use it.
That would be cool. Unlikely, but cool. There are a lot more warehouses across the country than I thought before I joined the trucking industry. And some of them are stuck in some of the oddest places. The Tums factory turned out to be literally 1 block from the St. Louis Cardinal's ballpark. Really wish I could have stuck around to be a tourist for an hour or two, but it took me that long just to get the trailer on their dock and they wanted me off the dock asap once they finished unloading.
but stability isn't something that would drive a gentoo user away either.
a lot of the draw of gentoo from what I saw was being able to configure everything down to how it gets compiled. it's simple to apply a patch to a package before it gets built or maintain a custom kernel config in nixos, as well as all the advantages of declarative os
Bohdi is pretty nice. Needed a Linux test device at a job a few years ago and for some reason this was one of the only ones approved. Was pretty solid for the few times I needed to use it.
I imagine there was a time when this wasn't obscure, but I'm guessing people today don't remember Caldera OpenLinux. That was the first Linux distro I installed/used. A guy from church gave his copy.
Caldera eventually became SCO. But I'm pretty sure I was using Caldera OpenLinux before the whole Novell patent suit thing.
Speaking of old, dead distros, my first Linux -- sort of -- was TurboLinux 6.0. I say "sort of" because I never successfully got it to install and run. : (
Limiting to those I have used daily and treated as Linux (used the terminal for example) probably Maemo. I used to carry my Nokia Internet Tablet 770, and then my N800 everywhere with me.
Maemo is also an ancestor of both Tizen and Sailfish OS
My first smart phone was a Nokia N9. I loved Meego which was between Maemo and sailfish. I hatred Microsoft before that, but them killing Nokia made my hate burn even brighter.
Sabayon Linux. I'm not sure if it's still releasing updates, the main website is dead. It was based on Gentoo and later funtoo, but had a package manager of precompiled binaries. You could still use emerge if you wanted to. Definitely a weird and interesting distro
Blend OS is trying to do the declarative nixos thing but with an arch base. That's pretty cool.
ClearOS was Intel's attempt at an immutable os. From what I remember it was really fast.
Edit: actually it clear Linux not clearOS.
Edit: also clear Linux is stateless. I don't know, there's a lot about it I don't understand
Jolicloud. I ran it on an old low-spec netbook in 2013ish, basically a ChromeOS before Chromebooks were a thing. It was discontinued in 2016 but great for the hardware while it lasted.
C programming language also uses STD in a lot of the standard library names (short for standard). I wonder if the creators of both didn't realize when they named it or did and thought it was funny. My bet is the latter.
I haven't tried all that many distros, but I'd say Puppy Linux. Pretty neat that it loads into RAM from USB and has fairly light memory requirements, but it does feel a little on the clunky side as far as configuration and stuff goes.
Probably KaOS. It puts a strong focus on KDE and Qt.
As in, it doesn't package programs using different GUI toolkits, aside from the most popular, like Firefox and GIMP. When I tried it a few years ago, you also had to enable a separate repo to get access to these.
Reminds me of chakra linux. Same principals, except built on top of Arch base, and the other toolkit apps were distributed as self contained image files.
Still hardly obscure and usage metric is anything but precise. Slackware doesn't have something like Debian's popularity contest and distrowatch only meters page visits.
Had support for the original Xbox, a multimedia editing / streaming focussed OS. I'd never run it on mine - just messed with xdsl before going back to XBMC.
Maybe not some obscure ones, but here are some lesser known ones:
Talos Linux. It's an immutable operating system designed specifically to deploy kubernetes.
OpenSuse Harvester Think Proxmox, but instead of VM's and LXC containers, it's VM's and Kubernetes.
XCP-NG is a RHEL based distro designed for managing Linux virtual machines using the xen hypervisor, as opposed to KVM. Think Proxmox, but RHEL and Xen (also no LXC). However, it does not come with a web ui out of the box, you have to deploy it yourself. Technically, XCP is a Xen distribution, since Xen is a kernel with nothing but a hypervisor that runs under the main distro, but the primary management virtual machine is RHEL based, and uses Linux.
Speaking of Proxmox, Proxmox is technically a Linux distro.
SnowflakeOS is a project that aims to bring a GUI focused experience to NixOS.
TurnkeyLinux (site is loading very, very slowly for me right now) is not a single distribution, but rather a set of debian based distributions that are designed to be turnkey appliance virtual machines that contain and host a specific app. To deploy the app, all you have to do is set up the virtual machine.
Now, here are some not-linux, but interesting distros:
SmartOS. They ported KVM to unix, and also can use Linux syscall translation (similar to wine) to run apps in containers as well. There is also Bhyve. It's a very interesting hypervisor platform.
OmniOS is similar. Bhyve, KVM, and Linux syscall translation in containers.
I used it for a few years, great distro. I think it's dead now. It was based on Gentoo but with thoughtful defaults and a very good binary package manager.
I used Sabayon for a bit too. It was basically "Gentoo made easy" with a simpler installer and as you said a binarypackage manager rather than compiling packages from source. It's wasn't 100% completely dead after dropping the Sabayon branding, it morphed into Mocaccino Linux, but when they did so they re-based it on Funtoo, which is also now dead.
2 days ago my friend found an old SATA hard drive and gave it to me to check what's on it, and me, not having a disk station or anything, and against all better judgment, I just swapped the disk in my laptop for my friend's, and instead of my laptop being fried it turned out the disk was running something called Crunchbang Linux
I used to run Reborn OS at around 2017 for a few years. It used Cnchi installer, just like Antergos, and when Antergos died, I saw Reborn as its successor. But the title went to Endeavour (why?) and Reborn never got popularity.
Not really, at least in sites like gutefrage (german site where the biggest dumbasses of the world unite) There were a lot of questions about them trying to use it as their first Linux distro because they magically care about privacy
Np, another OS that isn't Linux based, it's rather obscure-ish but it's genuinely impressive is Haiku OS, the community-driven spiritual successor of BeOS
Longene Linux. Linux-based operating system kernel intended to be binary compatible with application software and device drivers made for Microsoft Windows and Linux.
Not super obscure, but not many talk about it. Q4OS, I love it, a perfect windows replacement down to even imitating the old style windows installer. Plus it's Debian based so it has a lot of support. I plan on moving my grandparents to it when windows 10 gets fully discontinued as their current rig doesn't support 11
Rebecca Black OS.
It is the only Linux distro to date built around Weston, using Wayland's full capability:
It doesn't include any Rebecca Black theming or is related to her in any way.
It's just called that cause the dev is a fan of hers.
From the name, I expected a Hannah Montana Linux type distro.
Tell me if has a special "Friday" desktop at least.
I’m pretty sure that screenshot is Wayfire, not Weston.
right. This is Weston (same distro):
DSLinux
Oh jeez. I forgot about that. I had that running on my DS back in the day from a GBA flashcart with a big-ass CompactFlash card sticking out the bottom. Good times.
Wow, I just realized it was the first Linux I ever used
Yes, particularly the variant distributed on a business-card sized CD rom. To be carried in your wallet for emergency use.
Hannah Monata Linux and Red Star from North Korea.
Woah woah woah, there's a North Korean Linux distribution?
Yes, of course. They can hardly use an OS that phones home to the US.
It's interesting because it's essentially the opposite of the idea behind Linux. Using Linux specifically to censor and spy on people is diabolical, but it makes sense why they chose it.
The idea behind Linux is to create an operating system anyone can use in any way they want.
That includes the North Korean government using it to spy on their people.
Sounds more like a BSD kind of idea, to be honest. The GNU idea is to let specifically end-users have control over their own computer, not some third-party.
A meme Linux is the "most obscure" you can think of?
Actually the Red Star developers seem very serious
The first one that came to mind was fli4l (Floppy ISDN for Linux). Originally a distro of German origin that fit on a single floppy disk to turn a 386 or 486 PC into a router for ISDN connections. Last I looked it's still actively worked on.
There are probably tons of more obsuce ones. But this is one I actually used.
I've recently gone through my dad's floppies and found one with fli4l.
Check out the random button on Distrowatch (distrowatch.com/random.php) - it's like a Linux lottery, but you always win something weird!
Let's make this a game. Click on it, then you have to install that on bare metal and daily it for a month.
Got RISC OS
mom, I'm scared
Oh god, I got Murena (LineageOS distro). How does one install that onto a ThinkPad T480..
What are you currently using?
On that ThinkPad, LMDE.
Ha I got tuxedo OS, hopefully thats not too niche
That’s what I’ve been running on my gaming machine and it’s been great.
That's nice to hear!
I got Plamo Linux
I got portuex, never used Slackware but seems serviceable, I’m just scared of nVidia driver setup haha
Rockstor here. Which is interesting bc I’ve been thinking about setting up another NAS.
I got Linux Lite, which I've tried in the past.
Got PakOS, but since I'm not Pakistani I'm not sure how useful it would be
I got archcraft.
Lucky me. It's also from India which is fun.
https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=archcraft
Gentoo. Not that bad for a random pick.
This distro’s default background isn’t a knockoff of any particular popular non-*nix proprietary operating system’s default background:
Smoothwall. I used to run it a lot back in the early 2000s for personal use and even helped set up a couple small businesses with it but I don't hear of anyone else using it these days, people seem to love openwrt and pfsense more.
It was great for just taking any old x86 machine and making a powerful, fully featured firewall/router out of it, including a VPN server, all through a web interface. Nowadays that's boring shit but in 2002 it was pretty cool.
Good old Smoothie. Served me well back then. I think it went commercial at some point.
We had this as the firewall in our school! I remember bypassing it in so many ways with Google DNS and whatnot.
Any reason to use this over opnsense?
hyperbola
they have a wiki with insane nonsens about why they don't package certain things. Example:
https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:philosophy:incompatible_packages
Wait... they're militant enough about Free Software to refuse to package anything even slightly non-Free, but their "final goal" is to switch the kernel to BSD (i.e. away from copyleft)? WTF?
HyperbolaBSD is a hard fork, that relicenses the OpenBSD kernel as GPL (as permitted by permissive licenses.)
HyperbolaBSD has already dug into the OpenBSD source tree and discovered numerous licensing issues.
https://git.hyperbola.info:50100/~team/documentation/todo.git/tree/openbsd_kernel-file-list-with-license-issues.md
HyperbolaBSD will be a truly libre distro that takes advantage of copyleft, while moving away from the major issues Linux is stepping into too.
Ah, that's different then!
Hmm...
From https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:manual:contrib:hyperbolabsd_faq:
It's not clear to me that relicensing the existing code to GPL is what they're planning on doing; it sounds more like they're going to mix in GPL code but not change the existing files to GPL en masse after they finish harmonizing them to two-clause BSD.
Frankly, IMO that's too bad: I'd love to see them make the whole shebang GPLv3-or-later
Related question: is all Linux kernel code required to be licensed GPLv2-only, or are individual contributions allowed to be GPLv2-or-later? I'd be nice to see if that project (and stuff like HURD and ReactOS) could benefit from at least some Linux contributions, even if they can't copy it wholesale.
afaik Linus is against GPLv3 in his Linux project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU
It's an ancient divide in parts of the FOSS community that believes copyleft licenses are not "free" because they force you to license contributions under the same license.
Yeah, I know, but I would've expected a distro that describes itself as "GNU/Linux-libre" would fall on the other side of it!
No one thinks this. Even permissively licensed BSD operating systems package GPL software and accept it as Free Software.
Wow, you weren’t kidding.
Why so much rage?
Yes, Hyperbola is very ideological and super strict, but it was always meant to be that way - to provide a system that works in some way and at the same time is as ethical and "clean" as possible. Some people value it over anything, and for them, Hyperbola is a good pick.
Why did I read all of this.
elive
you think a distribution that automatically includes all the proprietary stuff that we use baked into the distro would be more popular since it makes linux ready to go for most people; but it still gets fewer than 300 clicks per month.
Jail.
They've been able to figure it out so far
Doesn't Pop!OS do that already?
And Ubuntu, no? Wasn’t that the big selling point of Ubuntu back in the day?
Yes, as far as they're allowed to in this country
I feel like the Enlightenment desktop environment isn't to everyone's taste. It's definitely got some idiosyncratic design choices...
Its unpopularity may be related to that it asks money or a positive review in a blog to even try. Used to be so a few years ago.
i wasn't aware that it had changed like that; i stopped using it when i switch to linux laptops from linux companies like tuxedo and system76
First I'm hearing of it. I'ma try it out
It made me lazy since they got everything to work out of the box. Lol
gobolinux
it's main feature is that it completely redefines the system's root directory structure. the only reason i even know it exists is because i'm friends with one of the creators
Gobo Linux has to have been the distro I was looking forward to most too. I really hope it picks up because it's design philosophies. Absolutely phenomenal.
You may wish to look into NixOS or GNU Guix as taking the same ideas to the logical conclusion, or stal/ix which aspires to take a more traditional approach and in that way is perhaps closer to Gobo. All three are very much alive and actively maintained, even thriving by some metrics.
I hear you saying "not compatible with FHS" but then extra words I no longer need to hear.
Meego, a combination of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo. It only ever shipped on one device, the Nokia N9.
I much enjoyed it back in the day. Nokia even had their own app store for it and gave a nice financial incentive for the first hundred or thousand apps.
I feel Jolla & SailfishOS is the spiritual successor.
Have you ever heard of arch? That's what I use by the way
Hardly obscure.
Suicide linux. Nobody can run it for more than a day
Edit: i just searched "suicide linux" to see if it still exists and one of the top results was ian murdock's wiki page, :(
Looked it up with quotes and the first update in the first search result:
:(
KISS
it's just a single bash script and a repository containing package definitions to compile them from source.
Basically LFS on drugs.
Interesting, was searching for anybody who mentioned LFS/Linux From Scratch leading here. Doesn't seem active anymore though.
Rarely hear about DSL anymore, http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
It was dead for a long time, was replaced in spirit by Puppy Linux, and only recently was reactivated.
That was my go-to long ago
Take your pick from the Linux family tree
I don't see nixos in there!
Should hyprland be in the table or are Wayland Compositors ignored? 👀
it's only distros
Man artix isnt there
I'm gonna go with Tom's Root Boot. Or maybe the father of all live distros, Knoppix.
Didn't think Knoppix was obscure, but that was my gateway to Linux first on all my personal PCs.
I guess the years have passed it by.
Don't think so either but it has withered away.
Yellow Dog
I actually ran this on a PPC Mac back in the day
Someone gave me a PowerMac and of course I had to try to run Linux. It was an interesting experience, it would boot to MacOS and then run the Yellow Dog bootloader. Couldn't get it to boot directly. That little experiment showed me how tightly Apple controlled what would run on Apple machines back then.
That was the my first distro. Getting it to run off a FireWire drive was an interesting introduction to Linux.
Fun fact: yum stands for Yellow dog Update Manager. I know it's been replaced by dnf but I still think that's cool.
I ran yellowdog on my PS3 until they took away the otherOS
Jarro Negro. Made by Mexican students. And as far as I know, it's independent, not based on another distro.
most obscure and to me coolest but unfortunately not very active https://sourcemage.org/
its always a bit hard to tell with source distros.
i was gonna say source mage! so i guess it's not that obscure, if two of us thought to mention it.
I think its obscure but some wierdos geek out on it :)
Well I don’t hear much about Gentoo, Damn Small, Puppy or Knoppix anymore. Wonder if they still exist.
I haven’t done much disto hopping since I settled on Ubuntu around ‘08 and then on NixOS last year. I like my systems working when I need them and waiting around for a new install to finish is boring to me.
Gentoo still exists 🙂
Gentoo still exists. Damn Small was dead for a decade but has risen again recently. Puppy is alive and well. Knoppix is still alive, but the last downloadable release is almost 4 years old.
I use puppy from time to time. Works well.
I think NixOS has taken a bit of Gentoo's mindshare. They solve similar problems with very different approaches.
How so? When I switched to NixOs I was looking for system stability over time. That’s not really something I associate with Gentoo, at least not on a desktop system.
They both allow you to deploy and update a highly customized OS across many potentially different machines.
Gentoo has cflags and cross-building
Nix has Nix configs
I somewhat disagree about the stability. Maybe it's no longer the case, but i used gentoo for a few years in the 2010s and it was always stable for me. A buggy upstream release of a package could be a problem in theory, but if that were to happen you can generally roll back the package and mask it from updates for a while. I never ended up needing to do that. However i agree that stability seems to be a high priority for Nix devs.
I'm tracking now.
The instability I had on Gentoo was largely a result of me setting up the system one way, deciding I didn't like it, uninstalling a bunch of stuff poorly and then building something new on top of it. All on the same install. For a little while though, I had a G3 Mac running headless as a small NAS. Never had a issue out of it but then I also never touched it except to update it, when I remembered it existed.
I found that Ubuntu was a more stable base for my mucking about. Then I got my first real job (truck driving) and didn't have time fix my system constantly and learned to just use it.
My first real job was forklift driving on a warehouse dock, maybe we crossed paths
That would be cool. Unlikely, but cool. There are a lot more warehouses across the country than I thought before I joined the trucking industry. And some of them are stuck in some of the oddest places. The Tums factory turned out to be literally 1 block from the St. Louis Cardinal's ballpark. Really wish I could have stuck around to be a tourist for an hour or two, but it took me that long just to get the trailer on their dock and they wanted me off the dock asap once they finished unloading.
but stability isn't something that would drive a gentoo user away either.
a lot of the draw of gentoo from what I saw was being able to configure everything down to how it gets compiled. it's simple to apply a patch to a package before it gets built or maintain a custom kernel config in nixos, as well as all the advantages of declarative os
Gentoo's forums are quite active and it's one of my daily drivers. I think the others kinda faded away.
DSL is basically an Antix spin now ( which is itself basically just Debian ).
Bohdi linux. smoll and beautiful. Used to run it on my eeepc 701
That's a blast from the past! I used to run #! On my 701...
Bohdi is pretty nice. Needed a Linux test device at a job a few years ago and for some reason this was one of the only ones approved. Was pretty solid for the few times I needed to use it.
I imagine there was a time when this wasn't obscure, but I'm guessing people today don't remember Caldera OpenLinux. That was the first Linux distro I installed/used. A guy from church gave his copy.
Caldera eventually became SCO. But I'm pretty sure I was using Caldera OpenLinux before the whole Novell patent suit thing.
Speaking of old, dead distros, my first Linux -- sort of -- was TurboLinux 6.0. I say "sort of" because I never successfully got it to install and run. : (
I never used Caldera Linux but I did use their DOS for a while.
Limiting to those I have used daily and treated as Linux (used the terminal for example) probably Maemo. I used to carry my Nokia Internet Tablet 770, and then my N800 everywhere with me.
Maemo is also an ancestor of both Tizen and Sailfish OS
My first smart phone was a Nokia N9. I loved Meego which was between Maemo and sailfish. I hatred Microsoft before that, but them killing Nokia made my hate burn even brighter.
Obscure as in "only for a very specific purpose and nothing else"?...
Well, there is the Mircrosoft linux distro for their azure cloud
I guess DD-WRT as distro for router is also kind of obscure. Or the more general openWRT for embedded systems.
Red star OS
Everybody knows glorious leader’s operating system. 😉
Sabayon Linux. I'm not sure if it's still releasing updates, the main website is dead. It was based on Gentoo and later funtoo, but had a package manager of precompiled binaries. You could still use emerge if you wanted to. Definitely a weird and interesting distro
Blend OS is trying to do the declarative nixos thing but with an arch base. That's pretty cool.
ClearOS was Intel's attempt at an immutable os. From what I remember it was really fast.
Edit: actually it clear Linux not clearOS. Edit: also clear Linux is stateless. I don't know, there's a lot about it I don't understand
I see no one has mentioned Bedrock Linux yet. Not sure though how others would rate its 'obscurity' though. It's definitely a standout among distros.
The old PearOS(which looked like a meme-ish knockoff MacOS), UwUntu and Nyarch
Jolicloud. I ran it on an old low-spec netbook in 2013ish, basically a ChromeOS before Chromebooks were a thing. It was discontinued in 2016 but great for the hardware while it lasted.
There was a bunch of weird rebadged Ubuntu derivatives back in the day.
Ubuntu satanic edition. https://archiveos.org/ubuntu-satanic/
Ubuntu Christian edition. https://archiveos.org/ubuntu-christian/
Hannah Montana Linux https://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/
Ubuntu CE outlived Ubuntu Satanic. W.
Technically it died and was resurrected.
Linux STD! Waaaay before skiddos had backtrack or kali
That's an...interesting name.
Security Tools Distribution :)
https://s-t-d.org/
Wait what? :o
Floppy distros were all the rage. Here's another one, still got a few floppies of it floating around the lab!
https://deadlinux.fandom.com/wiki/Tom%27s_Root_Boot
C programming language also uses STD in a lot of the standard library names (short for standard). I wonder if the creators of both didn't realize when they named it or did and thought it was funny. My bet is the latter.
I haven't tried all that many distros, but I'd say Puppy Linux. Pretty neat that it loads into RAM from USB and has fairly light memory requirements, but it does feel a little on the clunky side as far as configuration and stuff goes.
No one mentioned Bunsenlabs or Crunchbang Linux here, but they aren't really that obscure.
Not really obscure
Archbang maybe more?
Probably KaOS. It puts a strong focus on KDE and Qt.
As in, it doesn't package programs using different GUI toolkits, aside from the most popular, like Firefox and GIMP. When I tried it a few years ago, you also had to enable a separate repo to get access to these.
Reminds me of chakra linux. Same principals, except built on top of Arch base, and the other toolkit apps were distributed as self contained image files.
Right. Cjakra and KaOS were two I was following the developments as a KDE lover. Too bad none got popular enough, and Chakra even died :(
United Linux - the famous Red Hat Enterprise Linux killer!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Linux
I worked on that.
It was SuSe with any branding or tools ripped out, the carcass kicked over the fence for the rest of us to try to make an OS out of.
It had no chance. What we got was a bleeding corpse after SuSE had a sellable product to compete against us all with.
It killed turbo, it killed conectiva and it killed openlinux. Horrible thing.
If being usable is a metric, Slackware
Hardly obscure.
How many ppl do you see rocking Slackware nowadays?
Still hardly obscure and usage metric is anything but precise. Slackware doesn't have something like Debian's popularity contest and distrowatch only meters page visits.
dyne:bolic - specifically 1.4.1
Had support for the original Xbox, a multimedia editing / streaming focussed OS. I'd never run it on mine - just messed with xdsl before going back to XBMC.
Maybe not some obscure ones, but here are some lesser known ones:
Talos Linux. It's an immutable operating system designed specifically to deploy kubernetes.
OpenSuse Harvester Think Proxmox, but instead of VM's and LXC containers, it's VM's and Kubernetes.
XCP-NG is a RHEL based distro designed for managing Linux virtual machines using the xen hypervisor, as opposed to KVM. Think Proxmox, but RHEL and Xen (also no LXC). However, it does not come with a web ui out of the box, you have to deploy it yourself. Technically, XCP is a Xen distribution, since Xen is a kernel with nothing but a hypervisor that runs under the main distro, but the primary management virtual machine is RHEL based, and uses Linux.
Speaking of Proxmox, Proxmox is technically a Linux distro.
SnowflakeOS is a project that aims to bring a GUI focused experience to NixOS.
TurnkeyLinux (site is loading very, very slowly for me right now) is not a single distribution, but rather a set of debian based distributions that are designed to be turnkey appliance virtual machines that contain and host a specific app. To deploy the app, all you have to do is set up the virtual machine.
Now, here are some not-linux, but interesting distros:
SmartOS. They ported KVM to unix, and also can use Linux syscall translation (similar to wine) to run apps in containers as well. There is also Bhyve. It's a very interesting hypervisor platform.
OmniOS is similar. Bhyve, KVM, and Linux syscall translation in containers.
No one ever mentions Crux Linux
Clear Linux.
There was this distro that stuffs everything of a package in one folder, instead of /usr/lib & co. What was it called again?
Gobolinux?
Right, thanks!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoboLinux
Sabayon Linux
I used it for a few years, great distro. I think it's dead now. It was based on Gentoo but with thoughtful defaults and a very good binary package manager.
also Funtoo Linux, but i never really used it
I used Sabayon for a bit too. It was basically "Gentoo made easy" with a simpler installer and as you said a binarypackage manager rather than compiling packages from source. It's wasn't 100% completely dead after dropping the Sabayon branding, it morphed into Mocaccino Linux, but when they did so they re-based it on Funtoo, which is also now dead.
I had no idea mageia existed until I met a dude who had it
Not really a Linux distro, but TempleOS
2 days ago my friend found an old SATA hard drive and gave it to me to check what's on it, and me, not having a disk station or anything, and against all better judgment, I just swapped the disk in my laptop for my friend's, and instead of my laptop being fried it turned out the disk was running something called Crunchbang Linux
I loved that distro. Unfortunately it got discontinued at some point.
Crunchbang++ is alive and we're using it
Yup, in 2015, more or less, from what I remember reading the Wikipedia page. Got superceded by bunsenlabs, like notthebees said.
That's what bunsenlabs is for.
Not so obscure, just 50mb and very functional, in between tiny core and puppy.
I created a distro once for class that just had diaspora installed on a live CD. It was only used for demos a looong time ago. DiasporaTest.
Hikarunix
I used to run Reborn OS at around 2017 for a few years. It used Cnchi installer, just like Antergos, and when Antergos died, I saw Reborn as its successor. But the title went to Endeavour (why?) and Reborn never got popularity.
BOSS.
https://www.qubes-os.org/statistics/
Not really, at least in sites like gutefrage (german site where the biggest dumbasses of the world unite) There were a lot of questions about them trying to use it as their first Linux distro because they magically care about privacy
Chimera Linux
I had not noticed that KDE is available for Chimera now. Very cool.
Nice
Wsl just because it is from ms.
WSL isn’t a distro.
I think you mean Azure Linux ( formerly CBL Mariner ):
https://github.com/microsoft/azurelinux?tab=readme-ov-file
Kolibri
Kolibri isn't a Linux distro, it is a fork of MenuetOS and not Linux at all
Thanks, I didn't know that.
Np, another OS that isn't Linux based, it's rather obscure-ish but it's genuinely impressive is Haiku OS, the community-driven spiritual successor of BeOS
templeos /j
Hot Dog Linux, X11 Window Manager with Windows 3.1 Hot Dog Stand, Amiga Workbench, Atari ST GEM, Mac Classic and Aqua UI
Kiss linux. Gobolinux. They are both alien, but interesting, each one in its own way.
Shark Linux
Of those I'be personally tried, certainly chimera linux or mageia
Dragora Linux
One of the coolest distros, ever. It's like a mix of Alpine Linux and Slackware without dangerous firmware payloads.
Feren OS, a linux distro focused in customization. Started as a Linux Mint derivative, is now based on Ubuntu and/or Debian (I'm not really sure)
postmarketOS. Way too underrated.
Thank you 🤗 I hope not too many people see us as obscure though...
Windows 11
Longene Linux. Linux-based operating system kernel intended to be binary compatible with application software and device drivers made for Microsoft Windows and Linux.
Not super obscure, but not many talk about it. Q4OS, I love it, a perfect windows replacement down to even imitating the old style windows installer. Plus it's Debian based so it has a lot of support. I plan on moving my grandparents to it when windows 10 gets fully discontinued as their current rig doesn't support 11
(Since someone already mentioned bedrocklinux, I'll try harder)
... Try putting the Ironclad kernel in Exherbo. ;D
FreeBSD Just kidding
I think you mean Chimera Linux
Not obscure but I love hyprland
Also not a distro.