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What are the more obscure independent linux distros? (piefed.zip)
submitted 7 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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We all know about Debian, Fedora and Arch but what about the lesser known ones that are built from the ground up?

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[–] 17 points 7 months ago (5 children)

In addition to alpine id also throw nixos in.

It's a real niche OS with a very different approach to setup and configuration than any other I've seen and tested. It's now my server Linux and after more than a year I'm still not sure if I would recommend it 😂

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  • [–] 17 points 7 months ago* (1 child)

    I've been using NixOS for my laptop and servers for over a year and I'm totally obsessed with it. While I upvoted you for visibility, I wouldn't really call NixOS obscure anymore. I'm constantly seeing it randomly mentioned in various distro-agnostic Linux spaces online lately.

    Although it's been seeing a lot of hype lately, I agree it's still sort of niche and definitely not for everyone.

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  • [–] 2 points 7 months ago

    I can see where you're coming from! Specifically this community though I've not seen it a lot - you're completely right though, the more native one becomes the more one is confronted with it.

    I'm still struggling with the slowness of things (e.g. a quick endpoint change) and I can't get my head around reason error messages "fluently", i.e. I have to think about what the errors want to tell me instead of resolving it - a bit like old python stuff really.

    And then there are the edge cases ..... It took me a long time to change the config the very first time while offline - which makes sense from a model perspective but from my user brain it was just ... wrong :D

    Perhaps I should switch my clients as well to get more exposure....

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  • [–] 8 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 child)

    Aren't both Alpine and NixOS really big in certain enterprise areas? And NixOS and Alpine are both relatively well covered in news articles and posts.

    When I think niche Linux distro, something more like GoboLinux comes to mind:

    GoboLinux at a Glance - GoboLinux is a modular Linux distribution: it organizes the programs in your system in a new, logical way. Instead of having parts of a program thrown at /usr/bin, other parts at /etc and yet more parts thrown at /usr/share/something/or/another, each program gets its own directory tree, keeping them all neatly separated and allowing you to see everything that's installed in the system and which files belong to which programs in a simple and obvious way.

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  • [–] 3 points 7 months ago

    I tried more "niche from a popular perspective". You're right, especially alpine is in the background of a lot of docker containers but rarely an end user who just want their desktop environment knows them.

    For nixos I've not yet seen anyone in the enterprise world pushing for it - there it's still all about containerization and orchestration in cloud environments, using that as reproducibility layer. That might change though with data sovereignty discussions going on.

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  • [–] 6 points 7 months ago

    I’m still not sure if I would recommend it 😂

    sounds like a NixOS user to me! I've been using NixOS as my daily driver for the past several months and I'm not sure if I would recommend it. It makes the hard things easy and the easy things hard. I love the fact that I can very easily pass kernel params or gpu settings via my flake. that's nice. that's easy. I don't like finding some random FOSS project I want to try out and then trying to determine what dependencies I need, if I have them all in my nix-shell, etc.

    But honestly once you figure it out and set up distrobox on it you'll never need to distrohop again because you'll have everything on one OS.

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