I occasionally see love for niche small distros, instead of the major ones…
And it just seems to me like there’s more hurdles than help when it comes to adopting an OS whose users number in the hundreds or dozens. I can understand trying one for fun in a VM, but I prefer sticking to the bigger distros for my daily drivers since the they’ll support more software and not be reliant on upstream sources, and any bugs or other issues are more likely to be documented abd have workarounds/fixes.
So: What distro do you daily drive and why? What drove you to choose it?
I really like immutable distros, and am currently using NixOS. I feel like despite still being relatively obscure, NixOS is a bit of an outlier since it has more packages than any other distro and is (so far) the only distro I’ve used that has never broken. There is a steep learning curve, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for non programmers, but it is something truly different than all mainstream Linux distros while being extremely reliable.
Repology artificially reduces the number of packages instead of reporting the actual number. Which I find highly dubious because most packages have a purpose. In particular for repositories like the AUR artificially eliminating packages goes against everything it stands for. Yes it’s supposed to have alternative versions of something, that’s the whole point.
If there wasn’t for this the ranking would be very different. Debian for example maintains over 200k packages in unstable.
I probably should try NixOS, but I’m tempted by BlendOS
I use guix because, while it has a small community, the packaging language is one of the easiest I’ve ever used.
Every distro I’ve tried I’ve always run into having to wait on packages or support from someone else. The package transformation scheme like what nixos has is great but Nixlang sucks ass. Being able to do all that in lisp is much preferred.
Plus I like shepherd much more than any of the other process 0’s
As a nix user, guix looks legit nice but it took me until 2 days ago to actually find community projects made for guix(https://whereis.みんな/) . Sometimes I just wish they used the same store and daemon as nix so that nix packages can work as guix dependencies and vice versa.
(Also major thing stopping me from using guix is I don’t get service types at all, let alone how you’d define your own service :( )
You can use nix alongside guix, it’ll just double-up the dependencies on disk:
services (append (list (service nix-service-type)) %base-services)))Services are, in guix terms, any configuration change to a computer, so creating your own service 99% of the time is just extending
etc-service-typeand creating a variable interface to fill in the config file text yourselfCreating a service as in a daemon of some kind uses shepherd and involves extending
shepherd-service-typeorhome-shepherd-service-typewith your service description, depending on whether the service runs in root or user space.Shepherd service configurations aren’t actually part of the guix spec(https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/manual/shepherd.html#Defining-Services), but still use Guile, so you can interoperate them super easily.
It’s important in guix to understand lisp pretty thoroughly, and knowing how to program lisp is still a very useful skill to have so I’d recommend learning it even if you never touch guix.
These days, it is totally feasible to have the best of both worlds with a niche distro that is exactly what you want and Distrobox with another distro to easily bring in any software that you miss. Distrobox totally solves the compatibility problem.
For example, you could have a MUSL based distro like Alpine or Chimera Linux as your host OS. Need software that does not run on MUSL? Just install a stripped down Debian image on Distrobox and “apt install” whatever you like.
A few weekends ago ( just for fun ), I installed Red Hat 5.2. Not RHEL 5, real Red Hat 5.2 from before the Fedora days. My idea was to build Podman and Distrobox on it so that I could get access to the current Arch Linux repos ( and AUR ). I got a bit lost in dependency hell and did not quite get there but I was close. I might try again sometime.
I daily drive secureblue; or, to be more precise, its
bluefin-main-userns-hardenedimage.“Why?”, you ask. Because security is my number one priority.
I dismiss other often mentioned hardened systems for the following reasons:
- Qubes OS; my laptop doesn’t satisfy its hardware requirements. Otherwise, this would have been my daily driver.
- Kicksecure; primary reason would be how it’s dependent on backports for security updates.
- Tails; while excellent for protection against forensics, its security model is far from impressive otherwise. It’s not really meant as a daily driver for general use anyways.
- Spectrum OS; heavily inspired by Qubes OS and NixOS, which is a big W. Unfortunately, it’s not ready yet.
whonix?
Whonix is an OS exclusively meant to be used within a VM; at least, until Whonix-Host is released. Therefore, I didn’t include it as it’s not actually competing within the same space; as it can be run on any of the aforementioned systems within a VM. Finally, it’s worth noting that by its own documentation, it’s desirable to do so with Qubes OS.
I use Linux since 1999 and I’m with you, I don’t like niche distros. I like them to be well supported with many devs in them, and a structure around them. My days of tinkering died already in 2002 (I’m looking at you Gentoo and sia). Since then, I want things to work the way I expect them. That’s why I now use Debian or Mint.
Same. I started off on Gentoo, jumped to Puppy, jumped to Slack, jumped to Fedora, jumped to Arch, jumped to Nix, jumped to Guix, jumped back to Arch, and now I’m thinking Debian is the only true stable upstream linux needs.
Plus I’m sick of tweaking my configs for the N’th time to work on the M’th system. To quote a random side-character in American Dad: “I have painted my children for the last time.”
(I will at some point start playing with BSD’s though, I just know it. And Haiku too once they have decent laptop support.)
It’s like Linux From Scratch… with friends. Every distro has a purpose. I haven’t done super niche. One day I’ll probably try to run Gentoo much more seriously, and maybe an LFS just to see if I can.
Linux is the realm of all computer science students when it comes time to learn about operating systems, processes, threading, interrupts, schedulers, memory, etc. All levels exist in this space. The major distros all have underlying reasons they exist too. It is not branding/marketing like much of the consumer world.
Debian for ages, now Gentoo, Slackware and occasionally Devuan. Not really niche i’d say…
Because i like choice and flexibility.
I’m using Dietpi on my Orange pi zero 3. Aaaaaand because I’m (pretty much) forced to.
I too prefer big distros, but niche distros are usually big distros with small tweaks in the default config or installed packages. It’s Debian/Fedora/Arch slightly tweaked.
Because Hyprland Arch is the Bees Knees
I use Arkane Linux, which is based on Arch but is immutable. Every update is a new install. You can easily configure custom images to deploy for your specific wants or needs. It’s nice for keeping up to date with Arch while keeping how my machine is configured declared in an image. You can always roll back if something was wrong with the image you deployed too.
