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’m using RebeccaBlackOS because it finally utilizes Wayland’s capabilities fully.
Finally, an OS to rival HannahMontannaOS
It’s Thursday…what the hell are you doing!!! You’re going to break the Internet!!!
I would totally run RebeccaBlackOS or HannahMontannaOS in a vm
The distros are very different. HM is just Ubuntu with a theme.
RB is, to my knowledge, the only distro built around Weston, Wayland’s reference compositor. It doesn’t include any Rebecca Black theming, it’s just called that cause the distro’s maintainer is a fan of hers.Ah ok, good to know
Way back in the day we’d download Britney Spears and My Little Pony™ distros. Times change, I guess.
Breathtaking!
Lmao got worse as I scrolled down.
But xwayland is impressive. I’ve been using i3 but might switch to sway. The xrandr --scale command makes things too fuzzy.
void boots fast on rather old or very low powered copmuters :3
Also on modern firebreathers.
I like runit better than systemd, the packages are current, and it has most of what I want in the main repos.
I also found the documentation excellent in thst it’s a cohesive list of real-world topics rather than a 500-km-deep wiki or forum archive.
I should try a modern Slackware one day. I loved it back before I had broadband and just ordered a burned CD for each new release, but I should try following -current and the Slackbuilds stuff.
Slackbuilds are really nice. Sbopkg lets you download queue files for each program, then automatically install necessary dependencies in the correct order, no matter if they’re available as packages or from source. Unfortunately, Slackware is so bare-bones out of the box that there are still pitfalls. For example, LibreOffice depends on avahi. And to successfully install that, you first need to create an avahi user and group, then install avahi, then write an init script that starts the avahi daemon and another one to stop it on shutdown.
-Current is much too active for my personal taste. I run Slackware because I’m a lazy Slacker.
The laziest approach to Slacking today is to install the default full install, then do:wget https://github.com/sbopkg/sbopkg/releases/download/0.38.2/sbopkg-0.38.2-noarch-1_wsr.tgz #Download the Slackbuilds helper Sbopkg slackpkg install sbopkg-0.38.2-noarch-1_wsr.tgz #Install it sbopkg -r #Sync its local repository to Slackbuilds sqg -a #Build queue files (dependency info) for the repository sbopkg -i flatpak #Install Flatpak and its dependencies flatpak remote-add --user flathub https://dl.flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo #Add the Flathub repo
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.
Recently started learning NixOS and seems like it’s going to be ridiculously awesome! Documentation doesn’t look to be great in a lot of areas though unfortunately, so might be a while before I really figure shit out.
Repology artificially reduces the number of packages instead of reporting the actual number. Which I find highly dubious because most packages have a purpose. In particular for repositories like the AUR artificially eliminating packages goes against everything it stands for. Yes it’s supposed to have alternative versions of something, that’s the whole point.
If there wasn’t for this the ranking would be very different. Debian for example maintains over 200k packages in unstable.
Because I’m a software luddite that believe we peaked in design at BSD/Plan9, and most of the “innovations” of enshittified corporate mainstream distros (redhat userland, atomic/immutable environments, “universal” (unless you’re not on linux) package management, containerization of anything and everything) don’t impress me, and more often than not turn me away. I’m not saying software can’t improve, but when it comes to mainstream linux (especially redhat), innovation is always 0 steps forward 40 convoluted leaps back with bonus windows compatibility.
reliant on upstream sources
Not relevant to independent distributions, which I’d actually consider more of a problem with popular distros very often being forks (most often of debian).
Just out of curiosity, what distro do you use?
Or maybe, despite the question, you use BSD? ( which is cool if so )
I use OpenBSD on my production machine and VPS, I use Alpine Linux on my phone. I’m also partial to Void Linux, though I don’t use it on any of my devices at the moment.
So which distro do you use? Plan9 was never completed I think?
Plan 9 is still actively developed in the form of 9front; updates and new features trickle down to 9legacy from there.
The “original” Plan 9—meaning stock 4th Edition—is more of a museum piece at this point, though, yes.
Oh boy, I know where I’m losing my next free weekend
I shouldn’t talk because I dip in and out, but I do that because I like the possibilities. Like, what if someone comes up with a concept, but no one tries it, and it turns out to really work? Like, I like immutability as a concept, so I’ve tried Silverblue, Kinoite, and Bazzite. If nobody gave it a go, then the concept would die on the vine.
Also, I like seeing different ways of thinking about technology.
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
As a nix user, guix looks legit nice but it took me until 2 days ago to actually find community projects made for guix(https://whereis.みんな/) . Sometimes I just wish they used the same store and daemon as nix so that nix packages can work as guix dependencies and vice versa.
(Also major thing stopping me from using guix is I don’t get service types at all, let alone how you’d define your own service :( )
You can use nix alongside guix, it’ll just double-up the dependencies on disk:
services (append (list (service nix-service-type)) %base-services)))Services are, in guix terms, any configuration change to a computer, so creating your own service 99% of the time is just extending
etc-service-typeand creating a variable interface to fill in the config file text yourselfCreating a service as in a daemon of some kind uses shepherd and involves extending
shepherd-service-typeorhome-shepherd-service-typewith your service description, depending on whether the service runs in root or user space.Shepherd service configurations aren’t actually part of the guix spec(https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/manual/shepherd.html#Defining-Services), but still use Guile, so you can interoperate them super easily.
It’s important in guix to understand lisp pretty thoroughly, and knowing how to program lisp is still a very useful skill to have so I’d recommend learning it even if you never touch guix.
I Use Cachyos Its because it has alot of gaming tweaks and optimizations and because installing regular arch is quite painful (yeah its a arch based distro)
Linux culture is about freedom of choice and movement. Any project can be forked, tweaked, expanded, or outright overhauled by anybody with the know-how in order to meet specific use cases. And those use cases are often the same as other’s use cases. But in most cases, they are still rooted in the project they forked from. I.E, any guide that applies to Ubuntu is likely going to apply to Pop!_OS or Mint, since they’re based on Ubuntu. So there’s rarely a downside to niche distros, because you can have something that’s close enough to a popular distro but that caters to your unique needs and wants.
For me, for example, I use Nobara. It’s rather niche and in most cases, it either works beautifully for you, or it doesn’t work at all, honestly. But it’s based on Fedora, so any guide for Fedora is likely to apply to Nobara. I get all the benefits of being on Fedora with tweaks and patches that make my gaming experience much more stable. And quite frankly, Nobara has made my rig run the best it ever has.
Just saying, I’ve never had a virus with Temple OS.
TCPIP stacks hate this one trick
Actually lol’d
These days, it is totally feasible to have the best of both worlds with a niche distro that is exactly what you want and Distrobox with another distro to easily bring in any software that you miss. Distrobox totally solves the compatibility problem.
For example, you could have a MUSL based distro like Alpine or Chimera Linux as your host OS. Need software that does not run on MUSL? Just install a stripped down Debian image on Distrobox and “apt install” whatever you like.
A few weekends ago ( just for fun ), I installed Red Hat 5.2. Not RHEL 5, real Red Hat 5.2 from before the Fedora days. My idea was to build Podman and Distrobox on it so that I could get access to the current Arch Linux repos ( and AUR ). I got a bit lost in dependency hell and did not quite get there but I was close. I might try again sometime.
I use Nobara on my gaming PC just because it has some gaming tweaks by default but is otherwise just stock Fedora so any issues can be searched as if I was on Fedora.
I daily drive Slackware.
What drove me to it was curiosity. “How the fuck does a distro without dependency resolution even work? And why are people still using it?” As it turns out, it’s working very well actually. And I am now one of those people.
I like to tinker and solve puzzles. Installing the most old-fashioned distro on a modern convertible laptop, then bashing it till it looks and feels modern was a fun puzzle.
And it turned out to be a system I can daily drive on any device. Cause contrary to popular belief, you don’t need to hunt down dependencies manually every time you install something, that would be dumb. Once it’s set up, it’s actually very low maintenance and the knowledge I gained about its quirks will likely still be applicable in 10 years.What’s the Slackware way of managing package dependencies, then?
For Slackware itself, you install all available software up front. That way, all dependencies are resolved.
You then just hide the stuff you don’t need from your DE using its menu editor, or ignore it.
During an update, the package manager updates all installed packages, installs all packages that were added to the repo and removes all packages that are obsolete.For additional software, there is a semi-official repo that’s very similar to Arch’s AUR.
And like the AUR, it offers several helper scripts and additional package managers that do dependency resolution.
Or you use Flatpaks.you install all available software up front.
That’s unnecessary and inefficient, you can install a small subset and go from there.
Until you start installing stuff from Slackpackages, whose dependency info assumes everything in the default install is there and doesn’t need mentioning.
Or new packages are added to the repo which depend on something you didn’t install.
How long do software updates take then, if you’re updating the entire software stack? I can imagine the answer being anywhere from “hours” to “same as the incremental software updates on other distros”
There are very few updates. It’s more stable than Debian. And the repo isn’t huge, maybe twice the size of other distros default installed size.
Just use Gentoo mate /s
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
I don’t get “distros”
I can customize my system to my liking. There some popular bases but that is it
I used to think that, too. But even Ubuntu and Debian are very different operating systems now.
On the other hand, it’s all Linux under the hood, and almost all computing tasks can be done on almost any distro.Finally, almost all distros exist because people choose to maintain them as a hobby without payment.
Who am I to judge whether they should pool their resources on fewer distros in their free time?
I drink and doomscroll in mine.A Debian base is different than a Ubuntu base.
That still doesn’t change much
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.
