I'm going to say Alpine/postmarketos. The reason I say both is pmos uses Alpine as a base, but a lot of the code is built from the ground up as its a linux distro designed to run on mostly ARM devices (old phones and tablets. Even some old iOS devices!)

I've got a really obscure one.

Anyone here heard about FLI4L? Floppy ISDN for Linux? Built from the ground up to be usable on your really old PC as a router. Originally it fit on a single floppy disc and was able to turn a 386 into a modem or ISDN router. Later they added the ability to route between LANs and DSL.

By now the requirements have been raised to super beefy 586 PCs. It probably doesn't fit on a floppy disc anymore.

puppy linux! an entire live graphical desktop system with browser and office suite compressed to fit in 300MB, so you can run it from RAM and use the USB for storage.

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 😂

I have a copy of one called Poe-Lina Linux on a CD somewhere in storage. This is one of the few sites I've found about it (sorry, all Japanese, it came in a book I bought when I lived there), and here is a brief video of it.

GNU Guix System is independent I think. Interesting distro, but not for the faint of heart.

NixOS is fun once it clicks for you. It's nice having a system you can run your way, configured your way, and there's really no wrong way. I mean hell you can have your configuration in javascript if you REALLY wanted to. you can have everything in a single configuration file if you prefer that or you can have things in individual modules and managed via a flake.nix. You can have all your various configurations for your DEs/WMs/etc in the .config dir or you can put them all in a single file or you can have NixOS manage the individual configs for you for easy backup.

I like that it's extremely easy to reproduce the system and back it up. my system is backed up to a private git repo and if I need to rebuild my system on another PC it's just a matter of installing NixOS and then cloning my system repo and then I'm on the exact same setup as another machine. Also because of this and with nix-shells it makes dev work a breeze. same exact setup every time so the old argument of "well it works on my machine" doesn't apply.

All that being said I'm not sure if I'd recommend it to others. It makes the hard things easy and the easy things hard. But it's one of those distros where you'll switch from it for like a week or two and then miss it and want to go back. but keep in mind those weekly/bi-weekly switches are common. sometimes you'll just feel like you're spending way too much time configuring your nixos system so you'll switch to like Fedora or something so you don't have to think about it. Or you get frustrated trying to get something to work on NixOS so you'll switch to Arch where everything just works. but then you'll get bored of those distros and go back to NixOS.

It's a never ending cycle. Thankfully NixOS takes all of 10-15min to reinstall and back to the previous setup.

Bedrock Linux.

Bedrock Linux is a meta Linux distribution which mixes-and-matches components from other distributions and integrates them into one largely cohesive system.

...

Traditional Linux distributions distribute software which includes the Linux kernel. This is done with the aim of providing users a Linux based operating system.

Meta Linux distributions share the eventual goal of a Linux based operating system, but do so in a means other than distributing the end-goal software itself.

Other meta Linux distributions include:

• Linux From Scratch which provides a set of instructions to build a Linux system.
• Gentoo Linux which provides a flexible system which can compile the user's desired Linux system. Gentoo describes itself as a metadistribution.

Bedrock provides a means to compose a target of the user's desired system from a potentially eclectic mix of parts of other distros.

Introduction

FAQ

I'm running Gallium OS on an old Chromebook ... it's a dead distro at this point, and getting a bit frightfully outdated, but it's the only distro specifically made for that hardware.

Solus is build from scratch.

Buildroot, Alpine and OpenWRT

Just a word of warning: be careful of some of the more obscure distros as they tend to get behind on security updates

Slackware, Gentoo, the Mandriva family (OpenMandriva, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, ROSA, ALT Linux), Void, Alpine, Chimera, Venom, CRUX, Exherbo, Paldo, the PiSi family (PiSi Linux, old versions of Pardus), and Solus (eopkg is a fork of PiSi).

GoboLinux, Crux, Void.

oh does yocto count? it's more of a compiler that produces a linux, though.

Technically not a distro, but ELKS linux can run on 128kb ram in rom-based computers.

SliTaz GNU/Linux is a cool lightweight diatro.

Haven't used it in a while. It was dead for a bit, but it's active again. I should look at what it feels like these days. I remember being impressed at how smoothly it ran while looking good, +10 years ago, in 300MB or so.

Sculpt OS.

Although I'm not completely certain it is linux since it uses Genode which supports multiple kernels.

There's the Mandriva successors: Mageia, OpenMandriva Lx, PCLinuxOS and ROSA Linux. As far as I know, they are completely independent projects, even if they started as Mandriva forks.

SUSE, Yggdrasil, Softlanding Linux Systems (SLS)

Oasis, Derive, Kiss

Am gonna say Adélie Linux.
Tbh the only cool feature about it is the architecture support, I believe there was 2 more obscure distros with better architecture support.

Gobo Linux is interesting. It changes the way the disk is layed out

slackware, gentoo, crux maybe

there are stuff like tinycore too

source mage linux.

Trisquel GNU/Linux is a libre distro with zero proprietary software and zero obfuscated binary-blobs used in drivers.

So the entire codebase of your distro is visible and readable.

Based on Ubuntu, so it gets the best of Debian and Ubuntu, and then strips out the non-free cruft and possible exploits.

What about OpenSolaris and OpenBSD? Not technically linux, but more obscure, I think.

Hannah Montana Linux

TempleOS should be obscure, but everyone knows about it because it's such a joke.

Here are some independent distros I think need more respect/recognition:

• CRUX - It's proper old school, been around for ages, still does things the old school ways, gets you perhaps more knowledge of your system than even archlinux, slackware, gentoo...
• KISS (and/or Carbs) - Similarly keeps you hands-on tight to your system.
• Exherbo - Takes commitment, to go from 0 to 10, users as developers. Godly, if you can.
• SliTaZ - Still as small as the old small DamnSmallLinux, and more pleasant (comparable to SLAX and Puppy).
• Gobo - Always needs honorary mention. Unique file system layout ... ~ Would be cool if that were simply something we could toggle on any distro... Surely that's just someone taking an afternoon with an LLM making XDG configurations... no? Okay, probably more complicated than I know. ~ But I digress...
• GuixSD - Manage your system with guile.
• PCLinuxOS - Convenient, catering to desktop users. Nice community spins. Oddly uses RPM package format, but with apt interface.
• BedrockLinux - What I've used for about 14 years as my daily driver. It's cheating. ;) Linux's best kept secret.

Big fan of each of these.

Also peripherally aware of...

• venom
• adelie
• milis
• side (uses PiSi package manager)
• ToaruOS (idk, just saw it for the first time now... showing there's always more to explore...)