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What's the most obscure distro you can think of
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this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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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's forums are quite active and it's one of my daily drivers. I think the others kinda faded away.
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
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
DSL is basically an Antix spin now ( which is itself basically just Debian ).