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What's the most obscure distro you can think of
(slrpnk.net)
Take your pick from the Linux family tree
most obscure and to me coolest but unfortunately not very active https://sourcemage.org/
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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 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.
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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 I know it's been replaced by dnf but I still think that's cool.
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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)
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
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The old PearOS(which looked like a meme-ish knockoff MacOS), UwUntu and Nyarch
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.
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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.
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.
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.
Linux STD! Waaaay before skiddos had backtrack or kali
That's an...interesting name.
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.
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Of those I'be personally tried, certainly chimera linux or mageia
Shark Linux
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.
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Microsoft Windows.
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.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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