Haha nice try. If everyone starts liking it then it won't be niche anymore. So I won't share it! /s
It's Puppy Linux, isn't it?
Nah I just posted this as a joke. I am on Fedora + KDE. Mainstream and boring as they come. Rock solid and stable though.
I was just making a joke about your username being a distro tbh
Oops, self swoosh to me.
I think nixos is still niche, but seems to be gaining momentum. It has some unique features:
There are certainly downsides - poor docs, confusing core language. Instructions for installing something on say debian will not work on nixos. I do think this style of package management is the future, if perhaps not this specific implementation. It can be a pain but its also super solid.
I use NixOS on my workstations, and I'm slowly migrating many of my server VMs over to it.
NixOS w/flakes + home-manager + impermanence on zfs + disko w/ nixos-anywhere is amazing and gives an insane amount of declarative control over your system.
That said, the current state of the leadership gives me pause to recommend it to anyone, and I do have a few devil's advocate responses to some of what you said:
Every package has its own dependencies, so you can install a 7 year old firefox alongside the latest, and have no interference.
Unless the dependency is Qt, then it better all be the same version.
Abandons the HFS, but can still fake it for apps that need it.
Using ldd and nix-alien to patch in dynamic libraries still sucks, and often doesn't work without a lot of extra effort. If what I want isn't in nixpkgs, and I can't get nix-alien to work on the first try, I just end up not using whatever I was trying to run.
I hear you, its great for most cases, but when a package isn't available or downloads binaries that depend on hfs it sucks. I've been going through hell with android dev lately and am currently doing my compiles on debian, lol.
Obligatory GNU Guix mention
Alpine. The Linux, not GNU/Linux joke aside, Alpine's kinda great. Light, fast, stable, great package manager. I've daily driven it on both a server and as my main distro and it's pretty nice for both... Unless you're on Nvidia.
My first intro to it was with postmarketOS, and I have to say it felt super light and stable
I'm not sure if it's niche but openSUSE Tumbleweed isn't as popular as it deserves to be. If you are looking for more niche, back in my distro hopping days I enjoyed Kaos and Solus
Void is my favourite distro, although I haven't used it for a while. Extremely fast package manager, rolling release but not bleeding edge, super simple, very fun to tinker with (more than Arch imo). I stopped using it because I wanted something more popular for easier troubleshooting. But if I ever get a secondary PC/laptop I'll probably start using it again.
take a look at Alpine Linux – Alpine, Void, and Gentoo all grew out of a similar “Linux plus BSD” attitude – Alpine’s package manager is as fast or faster than Void’s – Alpine is pretty under-represented (but not absent) on the desktop side of things while being rather over-represented in the container, VM, server side of things (meaning the small community tends to be rather admin heavy)
If that is what you are looking for, try Chimera Linux. It was created by a Void maintainer.
Underrepresented at best, at worst it’s arguably too easy to forget that Alpine is more than just container images.
Not sure how to solve that problem, it’s my go to for rolling an image but wouldn’t normally make the shortlist for standalone machines. In a prod env, that’s basically Deb, RHEL derivatives, etc. In a personal env for me, Arch derivs tend to win out on non-critical services if only because I invariably learn something useful that I wouldn’t want to learn in prod.
Not a distro but Qubes. Incredible security and privacy out of the box. Not for everyone but absolutely one of the most interesting developments in the OS world in the past decade or two.
Qubes isn't a distro?
Not the person you asked, but they might have referred to the fact that (technically) Qubes OS is not a Linux distro because it's based on Xen instead. Though, even then, we might refer to it as a Xen distro (if anything).
https://www.crunchbangplusplus.org/
Crunchbang was one of the first Linux experiences I had and then found ++, I stopped using it recently to try out pop!os but the idea of crunchbang++ never leaves me. It was great on my little thin client laptop
My first linux install was crunchbang. I don't remember why I picked it. Perhaps i liked the minimalistic look. Ended up not really liking openbox and I vaguely remember running into some problem with debian's old packages, though I honestly can't remember what. So I switched to ubuntu, which was great for me as a linux noob.
I started using Crunchbang because it was so lightweight and ran great on Virtual Box on Windows 7. I stopped using it, when they stopped developing it. I wasn't aware of ++. I will be installing it this evening.
Guix - It's basically an abstraction over software compilation and distribution. It uses guile lisp language as glue to bind it all together. (Full programming language to configure with)
The beauty arises if you want to get a minimal os running with a single application and package it either as a full iso or a docker container you can. Or if you need to get an OS to run as your router.
It's also highly encourages free software to the point, that proprietary software actually feels like huge downgrade to include. (Compilation from source is always available)
I've been using this only for 11 months. I've barely scratched the surface on what is possible. So I'm pretty sure I'm not making it justice on what a gem it is. For example: Only recently I started to use programs in an immutable way.
Is Bazzite still niche?
The atomicity probably counts as an interesting feature, but it does seem to be getting more popular.
I installed it on my Desktop, replacing LMDE. Unfortunately I have trouble running the one game that I play even though it works on Linux with Steam. It worked in Linux Mint, but for some reason it won't start in Bazzite. Surely it's because I have an Nvidia graphics card, but that wasn't a problem with Linux Mint.
Another problem that I ran into was Firefox (flatpak) crashing all the time. Luckily you just have to disable wayland using Flatseal, but I still get graphics glitches with it.
I'm thinking of restoring my Linux Mint backup.
I don't know why I'm responding to your comment, I just wanted to share my experience, I guess.
Not niche, but surely exotic: NixOS, a distribution that is configured via a purely functional language. There is no such thing as installing or uninstalling packages, you add or remove things from your configuration and then simply apply that configuration.
I really wanted to like NixOS (and I do, theoretically), but I couldn't dedicate more than 5 full days over Christmas to learn how to get to a working development system.
I like TailsOS, which is an amnesiac system that runs entirely in RAM and boots from a USB hard drive. The goal for the operating system is to be a safe operating system for people who are in compromising situations - from international reporters to survivors of domestic abuse, it is a way to highly reduce your ability to be tracked.
The downsides of amnesiac systems are obvious - without enabling the setting for permanent storage, effectively everything you do on the OS is lost every time. And if you do enable persistent memory, well, that's not exactly entirely safe if you are caught out.
What I like the OS for though is as someone who is not compromised or in a situation where I need these privacies (despite appreciating them), my usage of it makes it safer for others who are using it (since internet is through Tor), and I feel more comfortable using computers in the wild when needed, since I'm not logging in on the public operating system that will be used by everybody else.
Many people give these projects flack or diminish their values as a "daily driver", but I think often times forget the important aspects of them. They may not be a daily driver for you or I by nature of our needs, but they are certainly important daily drivers for others. In addition to that, supporting a project that helps people in compromised situations and becoming another node to bounce off of (again, Tor, not inherent to the usage of this OS) is a nice additional benefit.
Tl;DR amnesiac operating systems because they're simple, straightforward, and make you feel more like whitehat hackerman when you've done nothing at all.
May as well contribute my own 😜.
I'm an absolute sucker for exquisitely hardened distros. Hence, distros like Qubes OS and Kicksecure have rightfully caught my interest. However, the former's hardware requirements are too harsh on the devices I currently own. While the latter relies on backports for security updates; which I'm not a fan of. Thankfully, there is also secureblue.
Contrary to the others, secureblue is built on top of an 'immutable' and/or atomic base distro; namely Fedora Atomic. By which:
If security is your top priority, Qubes OS is the gold standard. However, secureblue is a decent (albeit inferior) alternative if you prefer current and/or 'immutable'/atomic distros.
Not so much a niche distribution, but I would like to recommend Chimera Linux, because it combines musl with BSD userland.
Dietpi for me. It is meant for sbc's, but it can (also) be installed on x86 pcs. And its focus is on minimalism -- as much as possible.
I love dietpi. The entire software install is a huge 1000 line bash script. If that sounds horrific, it's genuinely well structured and readable
CyclopOS I haven't use it but apparently it has its own Remote Desktop app on play store
Not gonna lie, I thought elementaryOS was gonna take off and I guess it never did. I used it on my school laptop when I was in college for most of the time there. It was fine but mostly just a sleaker looking Mint basically.
TAILS for security
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Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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