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What's the most obscure distro you can think of
(slrpnk.net)
Chimera Linux
The first one that came to mind was fli4l (Floppy ISDN for Linux). Originally a distro of German origin that fit on a single floppy disk to turn a 386 or 486 PC into a router for ISDN connections. Last I looked it's still actively worked on.
There are probably tons of more obsuce ones. But this is one I actually used.
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elive
you think a distribution that automatically includes all the proprietary stuff that we use baked into the distro would be more popular since it makes linux ready to go for most people; but it still gets fewer than 300 clicks per month.
automatically includes all the proprietary stuff
Jail.
They've been able to figure it out so far
Doesn't Pop!OS do that already?
Yes, as far as they're allowed to in this country
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I feel like the Enlightenment desktop environment isn't to everyone's taste. It's definitely got some idiosyncratic design choices...
First I'm hearing of it. I'ma try it out
It made me lazy since they got everything to work out of the box. Lol
This. People always go "It looks like MacOS" but to me esp the icons just look like outdated Linux Mint/Cinnamon from 15 years ago. If people like ot that's cool, it's just not for me.
Take your pick from the Linux family tree
Man artix isnt there
I don't see nixos in there!
Should hyprland be in the table or are Wayland Compositors ignored? 👀
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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 🙂
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most obscure and to me coolest but unfortunately not very active https://sourcemage.org/
i was gonna say source mage! so i guess it's not that obscure, if two of us thought to mention it.
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I remember reading about it like 10 years ago along with LunarLinux (e: and sorcerer) as was curious about other source based linux distros. I thought both were dead, glad that at least sourcemage is still alive
its always a bit hard to tell with source distros.
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.
Rarely hear about DSL anymore, http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
It was dead for a long time, was replaced in spirit by Puppy Linux, and only recently was reactivated.
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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.
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.
Windows 11
The old PearOS(which looked like a meme-ish knockoff MacOS), UwUntu and Nyarch
Linux STD! Waaaay before skiddos had backtrack or kali
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.
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.
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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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.
Reminds me of chakra linux. Same principals, except built on top of Arch base, and the other toolkit apps were distributed as self contained image files.
I had no idea mageia existed until I met a dude who had it
Clear Linux.
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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