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.

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.

Have you ever heard of arch? That's what I use by the way

Jarro Negro. Made by Mexican students. And as far as I know, it's independent, not based on another distro.

No one mentioned Bunsenlabs or Crunchbang Linux here, but they aren't really that obscure.

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

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.

Hikarunix

KISS

it's just a single bash script and a repository containing package definitions to compile them from source.

Basically LFS on drugs.

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.

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.

SLiTaz

It's an obscure originally live usage oriented distro that you could also install. It was the first *Nix I ever used.

United Linux - the famous Red Hat Enterprise Linux killer!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Linux

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, :(

Dragora Linux

One of the coolest distros, ever. It's like a mix of Alpine Linux and Slackware without dangerous firmware payloads.

I'm gonna go with Tom's Root Boot. Or maybe the father of all live distros, Knoppix.

Rarely hear about DSL anymore, http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/