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Sell us on your favorite exotic/niche distro

The Linux ecosystem is vast and diverse, offering a multitude of distributions to suit every need and preference. With hundreds of distros to choose from, it's a pity that most are rarely mentioned while the popular ones are constantly being regurgitated.

This thread aims to celebrate this diversity and shine a light on smaller projects with passionate developers. I invite you to pitch your favorite underappreciated distro and share your experiences with those lesser-known Linux distributions that deserve more attention.

While there are no strict rules or banlists, I encourage you to focus on truly niche or exotic distributions rather than the more commonly discussed ones. Consider touching upon what makes your chosen distro unique:

  • What features or philosophies set it apart?
  • Why do you favor it over other distros, including the popular ones? (Beyond "It just works.")
  • In what situations would you recommend it to others?

Whether it's a specialized distro for a particular use case or a general-purpose OS with a unique twist, let's explore the road less traveled in the Linux landscape. Your insights could introduce fellow enthusiasts to their next favorite distribution!

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  • Is Alpine Linux obscure? Well, using it as a desktop is obscure, I guess. The decision to use musl libc is the main limiting factor for desktop usage, but thanks to the existence of runtime package managers like flatpak and/or static linking, you can run basically anything that requires glibc on Alpine these days (at the expense of extra disk usage for glibc libs).

    If you don't know much about Alpine, it is an extremely lightweight Linux distro designed primarily for containers and virtualization, that ships with busybox and musl libc. It's basically the closest you can get to GNU/Linux without the GNU. The main appeal to me is the simplicity of the tooling and installation, it's the only Linux distribution I've used that gives me a similar vibe to OpenBSD. The defaults are almost perfect, but the first thing I would do when installing it is install the docs metapackage (otherwise you have no manpages), and optionally replace busybox with coreutils and friends (personally can't stand how non-posix compliant busybox is). I'd also replace the default busybox ash shell with a nice kornlike such as oksh, a clone of the OpenBSD shell.

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