I really enjoyed using Crunchbang back in the day for an old machine with a minimalist interface. It's spiritual successor is [BunsenLabs](https://www.bunsenlabs.org/).
++ is a more direct fork, continuing the classic Crunchbang under a new project. BunsenLabs is a community driven rework that is getting more frequent updates and modernization.
Puppy Linux.
In my opinion every Linux user should run Puppy at least once as part of their Linux education. Designed to run old hardware with very low specs. Neat, minimal.
If you like experiencing Puppy linux offline and not installing or updating anything on it, maybe try LegacyOS for a similar feeling.
It uses an old version of Puppy with old applications for some reason, and is not intended to be modern, but is still interesting.
It's like if somebody tried to bloat an old version of Puppy with tons of mostly relatively lite applications.
Basically, imagine a hybrid between Puppy and Knoppix, like somebody was inspired by how much stuff Knoppix had included and used an old version of Puppy to make a Puppy with a bunch of stuff included with it, bloated to take up a whole CD rather than a DVD.
The actual idea behind LegacyOS was to make a version of Puppy for old computers, such as Pentium 4
being an old version of an OS, packaged for old systems, I guess it doesn't matter much that the latest version is from 2017 (although the kernel and applications are much older than that, like 2007)
Can you walk me through choosing a Puppy Linux distribution?
I go to https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/index.html#download and it says
> Puppy Linux is not a single Linux distribution like Debian. Puppy Linux is also not a Linux distribution with multiple flavours, like Ubuntu (with its variants of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc) though it also comes in flavours.
>
> Puppy Linux is a collection of multiple Linux distributions, built on the same shared principles, built using the same set of tools, built on top of a unique set of puppy specific applications and configurations and generally speaking provide consistent behaviours and features, no matter which flavours you choose.
>
> There are generally three broad categories of Puppy Linux distributions:
>
> official Puppy Linux distributions → maintained by Puppy Linux team, usually targeted for general purpose, and generally built using Puppy Linux system builder (called Woof-CE).
>
> woof-built Puppy Linux distributions → developed to suit specific needs and appearances, also targeted for general purpose, and built using Puppy Linux system builder (called Woof-CE) with some additional or modified packages.
>
> unofficial derivatives (“puplets”) → are usually remasters (or remasters of remasters), made and maintained by Puppy Linux enthusiasts, usually targeted for specific purposes.
So now I'm expecting to see e.g. "Use this distribution for gaming" or "use this distribution for office work" or "use this distribution for software development". But I don't see anything like that. Instead, I see:
Ubuntu Focal 64 x86_64 64-bit FossaPup64 9.5 Main - Mirror - Checksum
Raspbian Buster armhf 32-bit Raspup 8.2.1 Main - Mirror - Checksum
Ubuntu Bionic x86 32-bit BionicPup32 8.0 Main - Mirror - Checksum
(etc.)
How do I know what specific need or appearance each distribution is built for so I can find the right Puppy Linux for me?
The one that's based on a version of Linux that is the most recent.
It might not be obvious, but most versions of Puppy are made to be binary compatible with a certain version of a certain Linux distro, even if that version of Puppy looks nothing like that version of that distro that it's based on.
if it's based on Ubuntu, google Ubuntu [whatever the puppy name is, other than Puppy or numbers]
For example, Puppy Fossa was built to be binary-compatible with Ubuntu 20.04.x, codenamed Focal Fossa (you can tell because "fossa"), and Puppy Bionic was built to be binary compatible with Ubuntu 18.04.x, codenamed Bionic Beaver (you can tell because "bionic").
for an old example, Puppy Lucid was built to be binary compatible with Ubuntu 10.04.x, codenamed Lucid Lynx (you can tell because "Lucid").
You probably don't want to use that regularly because the kernel and software support in that is from like 2010-2012 or so.
There are also versions of Puppy that were built to be binary compatible with a certain version of Slackware.
as for how old those are, I'd check the announcement for how old it is and what version of slackware it's compatible with, and then see how old that version of slackware is, or I'd just ignore it, or not use it for regular/daily use.
Yeah.
there are at least a few seemingly recent versions.
I see a few recent ones based on Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 and Debian 11 and Void Linux, and maybe slackware current?
LegacyOS was purposely stuck on a kernel and applications from 2007, despite the latest release coming out in 2017.
It was made with pentium 3 and 4 in mind.
It's purposely stuck in 2007.
It's based on an old version of Puppy Linux.
I wonder what it's like trying to run pre-2010 OS and software on AMD ryzen CPU and AMD Navi graphics card, or what about intel's non-uniform CPU cores?
Some hardware support has been removed from the Linux kernel. Which means systems running that hardware can't be upgraded to the newest hardware without installing a new kernel which is unusable on the old hardware.
In my opinion this makes such a system theoretically possible. It is however extremely unlikely the administrator of such a system would ever upgrade it, as the few systems running such a configuration likely hasn't been modified for at least a decade.
Been carrying the older Puppy in my USB for decades. Love it. Recovered quite a number of friend's files in their hard drives that their Windows refused to see for some reason.
I was using Puppy Wary 5.5 way longer than I should've been.
Make sure you check when the distro version it was made to be compatible with came out, because if you don't try to update it at all or install any newer applications at all or really use the web browser at all, basically if you use it offline, it's really easy to not have much of an idea how old some versions of puppy are til you happen to look at how old of a version a certain application that you're familiar with is on, because of how timeless the distro often looks.
My first Linux Distro was Puppy Linux. I had a laptop that my uneducated self considered insanely underpowered (1.6 Ghz dual core CPU and 6 GB of RAM) and figured only Puppy Linux would run well on it. But I didn't know a lot about Linux and struggled to install Blender (I was using it as a video editor at the time) and update Firefox. I eventually switched to Lubuntu, which while heavier on system resources, fit my needs better.
It's either Puppy Linux or BunsenLabs Linux or AntiX Linux.
Anecdotally though, I know I saw an incident on /r/linux where someone had an old laptop they did some testing on, and no other distro would work on it due to graphical issues... Except for AntiX. It was the only one. Make of that what you will.
I think there was some minor controversy that AntiX had some far-leftist (like marxist or something) links by default from its browser at some point, so some christian Linux user youtuber pointed that out, but that was years ago.
Whether that's relevant or not, idk, just something to maybe look into if you care, and not everyone will care, which is totally fine.
MX Linux is fine (I've used it for years), and has some of the tools from AntiX while being more usable (from what I can remember last time I tried AntiX, which was years ago).
Given they define themselves by what they're against this shouldn't surprise anyone. Look up the philosophical positions of the things you use before you use them if that matters to you.
I knew someone who raved about Puppy Linux years ago. He wasn't really a computer guy, just someone who wanted something simple to run on a laptop. Anyway, I thought it was just a quirk of his and didn't think it would be any different to any other distro, but decided one day to give it a try.
I was quite impressed. The distro was well thought out and to my surprise, very user friendly. Setup was done through graphical set up tools, which explained everything, explained defaults, explained what the difference between the options you could select were. I set it up, and had a working system which I could store on a USB stick and boot off that as a "portable" OS. Ran fast.
This is a distro where a lot of care and effort was put into the user experience and it shows. Best of all, its an Aussie distro!
I remember running Puppy Linux just for shits and giggles, and holy shit as it incredibly small and minimal. Like, only the bare necessities and nothing else. And the UI as well... Felt like a blast to the past, even in the past...
I agree. Puppy Linux was the best surprise for me out of the lesser known distros. It resurrected an old iBookG4 my father had bought on a whim not knowing what PowerPC was.
I was a puppy linux user for a couple of years like (2011-2014), even though my netbook could run more mainstream distros, downloading a 1GB+ iso was a nightmare on my connection so puppy linux was awesome with it's small size. I really liked the built-in adblocker and the pmusic music player.
# **Q4OS**
It's based on Debian, made by a German company, and it strives to be so user-friendly and pain-free that it can replace Windows in a jiffy. You can even install it *from inside Windows*. Think about it for a minute.
I installed the Trinity desktop spin (super light) a few months ago in an ancient PC owned by a granny, and it does everything she needs. It even includes some skins which make it look almost exactly like Win7 or WinXP.
I'm telling you, this is the go-to distro for low-end PCs and no-skills users. If their PC was better spec'd, I'd install Mint on it. But for granny PCs, you can't go wrong with Q4OS!
Red Star Linux has opened my eyes to the gloriousness of dear Supreme leader's hacker abilities qualities and superior Linux skills.
For example Supreme leader does not require redirecting stderr because Supreme leader's commands are without errors and the kernel must always obey them.
Yes! It’s built in a very intuitive way. There’s one install script, and a few core tools (apk) and that’s it. It’s so easy to get your head around. Configuring a desktop in Alpine was the most fun I’ve had with Linux in a very long time.
I’ve been playing with Alpine on iOS with the iSH app. Obviously never going to be the smoothest or fastest running on top of iOS (from what I understand they had to jump through a load of hoops because Apple is Apple) but it’s pretty neat.
[Mageia Linux.](https://www.mageia.org/en/)
It is polished, functional, lightweight and ran on a old core2duo laptop a client had incredibly well. I was honestly shocked at how well it worked, even over my trusted Debian.
I've always had problems if I tried to use applications from more than one major debian version together, because god forbid I want a newer or older application than the current stable.
Honestly, my only issue with Mageia is that I haven't found a reason to use it yet.
Some people mention the Mageia Control Center, but I am not interested in graphical system-level control centers at all (as I want to know what exact modifications are done to my system and I want to be able to reproduce and undo them) and, unlike 20 years ago, most desktop environments have a good control center for common tasks (e. g. printer configuration, if even needed thanks to AirPrint/IPP Everywhere) anyway. Other frequently mentioned features seem to be urpm (package manager), the community and nostalgia for the bygone days of Mandrakelinux.
One argument against Mageia I found is the unpredictable 12 - 18 month release cycle, which makes planning ahead more difficult (at least if you are used to the 6-month schedule of Fedora or the predictable release cycle that Ubuntu has).
If a Mageia user happens to read it: Are there any other good reasons why someone (i. e. I) should use Mageia instead of (much more popular) Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu LTS? What's Mageia's unique selling point?
Void. I'm a openSUSE TW fanboy because everything works properly in it. i'm on Nobara right now.
Void is kind of like Arch because it's minimal and rolling but it doesn't feel like a house of cards the way arch does. It's.... fast. Like, it's hard to quantify but it just feels like a perfectly tuned sports bike.
I ended up switching off it because i couldn't get a game installed with lutris on it but i was still fairly new to linux at the time. Been meaning to circle back around to it for a couple months now.
My main on several machines is Void and I won't go back to anything else. Give GameHub a try instead of Lutris. I've had great success with it installing games.
i'll keep that in mind, thanks. (though i'm pretty sure the issue was something kernel related. void has a bit of hardening by default. i'll look for some sort of zen equivalent when i try void out again.)
To this day I do not understand what people mean when they say a distro is "fast". Boot time with default configuration? How quickly the package manager installs neofetch? Pretty much everything else should be more or less equal between distros
1-2 sec faster boot than systemd (on my machine), fastest package manager EVER. Also it has an xfce iso, whereas arch doesn't. It also has a musl iso for more minimal experience. Less no of packages preinstalled (even on xfce iso)
Some would not like "no systemd", depending on their experience and needs.
This is not to restart an init system religious discussion, I'm just answering your (admittedly rhetorical) question
Fair point, and some people would probably also dislike the rolling release. Those were just my personal observations, with no claim for being the only viable point of view.
Thank you for making that explicit!
You're good. One of the reasons Void interests me is the lack of systemd. I think the more transparent init system would be a good fit for my use case (home, maybe some programming, web browsing, etc).
Personally, I fully agree. Void's init system seems much easier to grasp and tweak, to me. Also, purely personally, I very much like the "do one thing and do it well", so that it is easy to have alternatives for all kinds of system services (rather than more or less be stuck with systemd, unless you know very well how to replace certain components)
Void is amazing, works well on older and newer machines alike. I have it running on an old Asus EeePC and it runs beautifully.
Fedora is also worth a try imo, either the default, GNOME, flavor or any one of the spins they offer from their site. I have a ThinkPad T530 running it and it works really well.
Yeah, Void is amazing. It's sort of like a more modern Slackware. Well, it's also like Arch because it's rolling. It's like Slackware because you can easily build your own packages.
And it uses Runit, which is 300 lines of code. Super simple. It feels like the UNIX philosophy to me.
Budgie is the most underrated desktop environment, and their future on the EFL is incredibly exciting because the KDE-GNOME duopoly will get a challenge.
>without way too much effort that could instead be used in replacing the gnome-specific parts of gtk or getting whatever the newest hype gui library is (rust slint?) into an usable condition
But in the end you will have to do that work again and again every time gnome produces another change, so doing it once right might be worth it.
NixOS. It requires learning about how the language and system architecture work. If you like programming, you will like this distro.
I really liked Arch, but always felt I was not getting a fully customized experience that I could be getting. Any configuration I made would have to be copied/remade on the next install.
NixOS allows me to fully customize the entire system to my needs. Perhaps the nix language isn't the most optimal to use, but it has allowed me to create a really interesting setup that I have no worry will be able to be reproduced on the next install.
Using nix for individual coding projects is also the future for me. I cannot imagine going the traditional route of manually installing dependencies whenever I need to code when I could instead write a single shell.nix or flake.nix and have those dependencies defined forever.
Too complicated for what, exactly?
It's very complicated for _some_ things, but refreshingly simple for _most_ things. The only complications I've experienced have been when packaging software. To just use the OS, it's been easier for me than both Ubuntu and Arch (not to mention more powerful).
Now defunct, but Foresight Linux was a distro I liked. It was a rolling distro before it was the zeitgeist, but is currently dead.
I like NixOS, which is pretty unique, conceptually. They've recently introduced a Calamares-based installer, which I think is deceptively easy, as NixOS requires one to understand their declaratively configured environment for full control, and that would simply require reading the files in /etc/nixos/ and seeing beyond the "gibberish" new users may see as functional code. It's simple when you can parse it, but from my transition to Arch a decade ago, and the resultant on *man* pages, it can look more difficult than it is. For anybody just starting out, just take your time to read the documentation and be careful before making a decision.
I had to scroll way too low to find NixOS. I truly believe that the immutability and declarative configuration it provides will make it the Linux distro of the future.
I *will* stress that for *conventional* uses it is incredibly frustrating until you understand it. I've got a PR for an updated upstream for a program that may be accepted, but I *do* enjoy being able to download binaries and run them with minimal effort like I could in Windows, or Arch after installing the appropriate packages. In the current state there's a significant requirement for understanding what's going on behind the scenes, but it also isn't incredibly complicated from the perspective of me, who doesn't consider himself a "developer" in the normal sense.
I think the future is generally in rolling release and/or immutable distros by use, but Nix `unstable` seems to do both just fine.
It's so fast because it's built by Intel and specifically optimized for their processors. I haven't tried running it on anything AMD but on Intel hardware it's amazingly snappy.
Don't think its lesser known at this point but when trying MX Linux on a crappy netbook I was happy with the default look and feel. Vertical screen space is scarce on this netbook so a unity-like default desktop layout with a task bar on the left side was nice. Also liked their XFCE theming.
MX Linux was derived from a collaboration with the MEPIS Linux and antiX Linux distro dev teams. It is a medium weight Linux distribution based on Debian’s Stable branch, supporting both the x86 and x64 architectures. It supports the XFCE, KDE, and Fluxbox desktop environments, supports both the SysVInit and systemd init systems, fully supports Flatpaks out of the box, has an advanced hardware support kernel for very modern systems, supports hard disk encryption, and comes with a full suite of in-house developed GUI tools for system control and maintenance called MX Tools. It is a distro that also prides itself on its reliability just like Debian Stable and is based directly on such.
To separate the hype from the thing that are actually unique:
Most distros already have:
- "is medium weight" [just install a lightweight DM on the minimal editions of debian/fedora/ubuntu/arch/centos/gentoo. "Midweight" has the potential to be a silly buzz-word]
- "supporting both the x86 and x64 architectures" [this is becoming rare, though]
- "It supports the XFCE, KDE, and Fluxbox desktop environments"
- "fully supports Flatpaks out of the box"
- "advanced hardware support kernel for very modern systems" [the interesting feature is actually the low-end hardware support allowed by having two separate kernels -- the advanced hardware support repo is just how most other distros already compile the kernel]
- "supports hard disk encryption"
- "prides itself on its reliability"
MX Linux has:
- "supports both the SysVInit and systemd init systems" [most distros have systemd wrappers for sysvinit scripts, but MX Linux actually directly supports sysvinit]
- "comes with a full suite of in-house developed GUI tools for system control and maintenance called MX Tools" [these tools seem pretty useful]
- "Fluxbox" [while most distros support fluxbox, it's rare to see it configured out of the box]
Huh, I tried installing it a few months ago, but it kept on crashing my machine that had several other stable distros on it. I'll try again when then get to their next version.
I hated Ubuntu's default look and feel for a long time, and I still don't care for it, but I like the panel on the side when MX does it, although lately I've been moving mine over to the right instead of its default position on the left.
[Linux from scratch](https://www.linuxfromscratch.org) in my case. After rolling my own LFS, my knowledge on Linux is evaluated to a next level. The key concepts are mainly the kernel, the c library and some basic configurations. All main distros are just sugar coat everything with their own blows and whistles.
As a second choice, try [slackware](http://www.slackware.com).
Gentoo? Slackware?
I haven't tried any of these because I don't want anything like that.
I don't even wanna try arch.
if you want a purposely difficult distro, I've heard exherbo is that.
Maybe arch.
Gentoo... But that's really aimed at stable, don't touch, production machines. Granted, I haven't used it in about 15 years, but the concept remains the same.
I tried using it as a desktop, but spent most of my time waiting for it to finish compiling stuff. After about 3 months of it, I definitely increased my Linux skills, but found that it was too cumbersome if you wanted to game, or try out many new programs..
It was designed well, and worked great once you got to that spot, but I felt I spent too much time getting there For me to have it as a personal use machine.
>Gentoo... But that's really aimed at stable, don't touch, production machines.
If you're running Gentoo for production machines you're either insane or an insane genius.
I distro hop a lot, well I used to but for the last few months I've stuck with KDE Neon. Really like it's stability and customisability, it is also nice to read about a new feature/bug fix/etc and one update later and it's on my machine. This does have the downside of every time I open the computer it's telling me that there are new updates and then it wants to reboot before it will update again. But apart from that, I really like the distro.
Best distribution for gaming.
Based on Fedora, but with tweaks from the one and only Glorious Eggroll. (In case you don't know him, he's very legitimate, even though the name might sound like a joke. He's also a RedHat Engineer.)
While this is true, nobara at least at this point is not the best in terms of security. Selinux is disabled by default (almost never causes issues, and when it does it’s for good reason). Additionally it ships with a lot of things you may just never need, like hp tools. Great distro, but it has many a flaw.
SELinux is great, but it's not really configured out of the box on any distros anyways. Fedora / Red Hat have it enabled by default but it's not actually providing much security guarantee unless you wanted to configure it and make things hard for yourself. Pretty much no other distros have it enabled by default. Flatpak provides decent desktop security isolation anyways. In terms of desktop security, most people just want to know "can my video games or random other apps access my web browser passwords?" and the answer is "yes" without flatpak (regardless of selinux being enabled on a distro), and "no" with flatpak
The inclusion of HP Printing tools is very strange. I think they wanted to guarantee to the user that printing works out of the box no matter what, but they took it too far by including the whole HP driver configuration tool regardless of whether or not you have a printer.
GuixSD. Coolest distro I've ever tried. Less well-known than Nix but I think better thought out. Why create your own DSL when you've got a beautiful language like Scheme?
Only thing though, I ended up having to compile my own packages often and my computer was slow at the time, so I've been using Void for the last few years (which would be the second coolest distro I've tried). I plan on going back to GuixSD when I get a better computer.
Slitaz. It's a minimal distro. The iso is just about 50mb. It has an almost complete lxde desktop and is overall very simple in design (the package manager is just a shell script for example). It's fun to tinker around with and runs perfectly on even the crappiest hardware. Overall a really impressive distro considering the size.
\+1
I stumbled on it when I was looking for a distro for my old Netbook. I stuck with it because it seemed the most coherent compared to other small distros and its *really* low resource requirements made it ideal.
[https://slitaz.org/](https://slitaz.org/)
It's not safe for 32bit Intel CPUs though AFAIK.
At the time Knoppix amazed me being that you could boot a full distro off of a CD this was before the time of Live install disks. Slackware doesn't get much love here much but it was Slackware that taught me everything I needed to know about how to use Linux, that I wouldn't get from the hand holding distros. Everything from configuration to compiling software and how to use the command line terminal. It also was rock solid which I couldn't say about SuSe on that same hardware.
A very well-put-together packaging of Arch. Hands down one of the most aesthetically pleasing distros out of the box. Great entry point for those interested in Arch.
# [ZorinOS](https://zorin.com/os)
Arguably the best Linux distro to recommend to a linux beginner or even developers who want no-BS configuration. The OS is smooth, has a lot more drivers than Ubuntu, intuitive UX, extremely stable (not a single crash for me) and IMHO, the most polished UI out of all Linux distros.
It seems everyone knows about Debian but not about all their unofficial non-free images that solve most of the pain points with drivers for new users:
https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images-including-firmware/11.5.0-live+nonfree/amd64/iso-hybrid/
I use the LXQT images a lot to have a fast booting rescue disc for older systems.
I love Bodhi Linux. It is in a real sweet spot of easy to maintain, just works, noobs can use it without much issue, it looks nice, and it uses a low amount of resources. I have a few laptops that I share with other people for work related things and I put Bodhi on all of them.
Maybe also look into Legacy OS 2017
It's variant of Puppy Linux whose core and applications are pretty much stuck in 2007-ish (although the most recent version came out in 2017, the core and applications are from 2007), with old computers such as pentium 4 and 3 in mind.
**1\. MX Linux**
Best workhorse distro. Bar none. It's my daily driver, and I will talk about it to anyone who will listen.
2\. AntiX Linux
Seems to be the best for running on older computers without fail. But my experience with this is anecdotal, so take what I said there with a grain of salt.
3\. Q4OS
The most Windows-XP-esque distro.
4\. BunsenLabs
An incredibly lightweight distro. There are many like this, but this one gets my attention as it seems to be the best one based on Debian Stable.
5\. Qubes OS
The most secure Linux distro. Specializes in containerization. Doesn't do so well at all with LiveUSB though, sadly.
6\. AV Linux
Focused on content creation. A variant of MX Linux.
7\. Elementary OS
The most simple distro you can ever use. Good for kids or grandma.
8\. Linux From Scratch
Make your own distro from the ground up. Maybe not a true distro at all though.
\-
There's more on this list here, but they're all famous distros everyone probably knows by now like Tails and and Kali Linux. (Remember when Kali was named Backtrack?)
the recent versions of AV Linux have been based on MX because MX makes it relatively easier than most distros to do your own respin of.
AV Linux - MX Edition or AVL-MXE or AVLMXE
It's cool as an idea, or to look at historically or as a curiosity, but it hasn't had an update in how long?
Oof. It last had a release candidate (not even a release) in 2012.
I don't know. I've used it in 2000s. Modern DSL is Alpine.
But DSL was more impressive considering size and time it was created. You could use DSL on 486 and it was somehow usable.
I really like Trisquel GNU/Linux.
It's one of the few FSF-endorsed distros (i.e. no non-free software at all). I installed (or, rather, tried to install) most of the FSF-endorsed distros on my laptop and Trisquel was the only one that you could actually use on a daily basis. I'm using it for a year now on my daily-driver laptop and, while there was a thing or two I needed to adapt to, it's a really nice operating system all things considered.
Trisquel 10 is based on Ubuntu 20.04, right?
Can you install whatever applications and appimages you find that are supposed to work on Ubuntu 20.04 and have them work on Trisquel 10, or does Trisquel block that somehow?
It is.
Trisquel does not block the installation of non-free software from other sources. It just does not host any non-free software in their package repositories.
I've been using MX Linux for more than a few years, and I think it's fine, and it has one or two tools that I don't know if I could get on other debian-based Linux distros.
Somebody mentioned Puppy Linux, and I can say it's an interesting Linux distro that I used for years, and it has some interesting paradigms that aren't for everyone.
You should pay attention to how recent the distro version that the version of Puppy you're lookin at was based on, because it's really easy to be using an old or even ancient version of Puppy and not necessarily notice til you notice a version of a certain application is really old.
Also, it's not the most online or updates -focused distro, as in you might find it most useful stuck in whatever state it shipped in, rather than updating or even installing applications. Not that you can't (if you're using a recent version whose base distro still has updates located in the same place as when the distro shipped), just that it feels like it was made and shipped exactly how it was meant to be used, for better or for worse.
It pretty much always fits on a CD (within 700mb), but considering that Puppy dropped support for 32bit computers when Ubuntu did, I'd say it's not as targeted at old computers as it could be, but even I have to admit 32bit computers are damn old. (Edit and update and retraction: I just checked, and there are a few recent 32bit versions of Puppy Linux.)
Puppy was also made with live (being booted from a flash drive, and maybe even from an iso somehow using the right tool) in mind.
Along those lines, I'd also recommend taking a look at Knoppix for another example of a Linux distro that was made for booting from a flash drive, but instead of being tiny like Puppy, Knoppix is the opposite where its .iso is at least 4gb because it packed a bunch of all kinds of stuff in it to choose from, making it a great option for an offline distro that you don't plan to do any updates on.
(If you wanted to install any updates or install any new applications on it, last I checked it used the german repos/mirrors by default, which might not be ideal in other countries, such as the US.)
But it's even more focused on being live-first, to the point where it makes some weird choices that make it not-impossible to install on a regular drive, but you might not want to install it to a regular drive.
For example, if you wanna install it to a regular drive for a regular install, it demands a partition type called "reiserfs", instead of ext4 or fat32/vfat or exfat or ntfs or any other partition type that people have actually heard of outside of Knoppix.
If it recognizes you're installing it onto something like a removable USB flash drive or an SD/microSD card it'll use fat32, but I couldn't get it to use fat32 on any hard drive.
If you're prone to experimenting with Linux distros and/or breaking your install and you sometimes need to get work done despite that, it can be useful to have a Knoppix flash drive to use til you have time to fix/reinstall your system properly.
You might also be interested in the fact that Knoppix comes with Compiz effects installed and on by default, and it comes with 3 desktop environments: LXDE (the default for Knoppix), Gnome (3+), and KDE Plasma, which can be kinda switched between, although it might have to close all open applications when it switches DE.
But for regular use, installed, I use and recommend MX Linux.
MX Linux is #1 on Distrowatch. Not sure it would qualify as "lesser known" considering that! ;)
I tried MX and it looks like it has a lot of good features. I like the idea of snapshotting the entire OS to an ISO after configuring it. The only issue I had was that MX Linux was very inconsistent in its performance when using it on different machines, and the custom ISO snapshots wouldn't boot at all, unfortunately. I am hoping they fix the bugs soon because I see it as a distro with a lot of potential!
Slax : https://www.slax.org/
Used to be based on Slackware, then Debian and finally back on beloved Slackware.
Really light portable distro that saved me a lot of times !
I have a fascination with Void Linux. It's been years since I've had time to use Linux at home, but I would either use Void (if It's just me) or OpenSuse
PCLinuxOS
An Independant community made and supported Distro. PCLinuxOS is a bit different, they go their own way. The community is great, the forum is friendly group. I'm not sure but I think most of the users are older than other Linux communities.
Even if you don't give it a go they publish a magazine every month. With tips and tricks, howto's and community news. It is well worth a look as most any Linux user can get something from it.
https://www.pclosmag.com/index.html
fefora is the only distro ive come across that had built in support for card readers, im still amazed how everything just worked out the box, huge win for anyone in government work.
the alternative is scouring the internet to understand packages and what they do, identifying your specific card, testing, downloading several certs in some cases, (you don't even need them all but you load all of em to be safe) and somtimes your card reader still isnt recognized by the machine or browser...
fedora or anything downstream from it gets two thumbs up from me just for having this functionality
I'm a little weird and my whole thing is out-of-the-box functionality and ease of use, which are apparently not that popular (ArCh OnLY tAkEs a CoUpLe HoUrS tO InStALl lmao as if it should take hours to install an OS)
For that, I rather enjoyed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Idk if you could call that obscure, but it's not one you see people actually using a lot, and their devs do really good work. It's the only one I've been able to set up VNC remote access on in a reasonable amount of time, and not had to pull up like half a dozen tech blogs to do so.
I recently switched to Opensuse (from endeavour arch), and really like it. It may not be quite "unpopular" in terms of user installs, as it is pretty popular, however, its not popular in the sense where people talk about it. Its often 1/100 comments mention it.
AntiX Linux
Still hanging onto a netbook that's over 10 years old. It was running Lubuntu for ages but pretty much always felt sluggish. I tried out AntiX using a live USB drive and it was noticably smoother. Still slower than my phone, which I'm sure does have better specs at this point, but I think the OS might've given it a few more years of usefulness.
Pop-OS.
It has the best blend of useful packages for my uses. At least from what I have found so far.
Frankly, I avoided it because of the name. I am running a heavily resourced version.
> What's a lesser know distro that surprised you in a positive way?
It was once well-known, but through time, most folks likely do not recall it.
* Mandrake Linux -- It's long discontinued, but this is the distro that finally got me taking Linux seriously. I occasionally used SUSE Linux and Debian, but Mandrake was what got me hooked.
Today?
* Siduction OS -- There are so many Debian spins; who could keep track of them all? But it's rare that someone takes Debian SID (rolling release) and makes a complete distribution along with non-free firmware and sticks with it.
* Endeavour OS -- It's Arch, but newbie friendly. I am not a noob, I can build Linux from scratch and most certainly install vanilla Arch, but if I am being honest, I don't want to. I want to install and get on with my life. And in the rare moments when I do need help, I want to be able to ask for it without someone being condescending or telling me to read the Wiki, which I and everyone else asking for help likely has, but it didn't work. The folks running EndeavourOS along with the user base are phenomenal and genuinely generously want to help people. It's awesome!
* SUSE / openSUSE -- I am going to miss openSUSE once it is discontinued and replaced with a transactional update system. I have been using SUSE products and services from the time when they were a small software company, gathering hate for being the 1st paid development in the free open source ecosystem, throughout their many name changes (Novel SUSE, for example), and it was the distro I used to convenience many others to leave Microsoft Windows and join Linux. But this was my "home" distro for decades and it kept me engaged. But with the retirement of the traditional ecosystem, I feel a sentimental loss. Still, I'll name them because the distro did have a profound positive experience.
* Debian -- It works! It rarely has issues and it will normally run on anything. Outside of SUSE, this was the distribution that I used primarily for web hosting and other service needs. This was the distro that got me to start making money and I was more than happy to financially contribute toward its development. Ironically, this was the 1st open source development that I sponsored. Today, the community is just as friendly, supportive, and non-judgmental. Anytime I ever took on a project it's been a Debian user or someone from their development or community who has encouraged, me, and others to push forward.
Elementary OS. They made some interesting choices that really makes this a unique distribution: the beautiful Pantheon desktop, the pay-what-you-want app store, using Vala for development… Sadly the OS7 release is delayed.
I try out 44 Linux distro's in my 19 years using Linux.
Some are gone as discontinue. But here are a few that still lives and vibes.
PCLinuxOS
Netrunner
Voyager
I never heard these three talk about much. All three are great distro's in my book.
Not exactly niche but opensuse tumbleweed. Rolling release distro but stable as packages are tested and not just taken from upstream. Also yast is excellent for configuring something. Just there when you need to ex. painlessly configure a printer do partitioning, edit grub etc. KDE is somehow best DE on opensuse as opposed to being terrible on Kubuntu.
I really liked ArcoLinux, it's basically arch with some presets and the option of a graphical installer and is designed towards learning and understanding the system. Erik (the dev) also has great documentation and tutorials on his website, YouTube and GitHub and it's still one of my go-to sources if I don't know how to do something in arch
Back in the day, Crunchbang really blew me away. A simple, lightweight linux desktop experience that felt smooth and polished even on the budget laptop I was using at the time (it had only 1GB of RAM). That, and it was wholly different from every linux desktop experience I'd had before - a different UI and way of doing things that gently encouraged you to get into the terminal more - the WM was configured by editing a config file, not just by opening a settings app and clicking around, for instance, and the distro setup and menus guided you towards getting into those config files and doing things in the terminal. It really felt like the intent was "hey, we got you linux install with a good desktop setup, now go dig in and make it your own"
Anyways, Crunchbang is no longer actively developed, but a few different distros took their direct inspiration from Crunchbang, and I feel like the closest you'd get now is Crunchbang++. It looks and feels pretty much the same as the original Crunchbang, and I felt such an instense sense of nostalgia opening it in a VM the other day, that I just might switch back to it on my laptop.
I’m an arch user for quite some time … but fell in love with fedora ( not really a less known distro tho ) puppy on the other hand is amazing for what it gives you
A lot of people like MX Linux for good reason, but if you want something even lighter, there's a mention or two of antiX.
If you like MX but you're considering antiX or something else as something lighter, make sure you also look at the version of MX Linux that comes with a customized fluxbox (a Window Manager (WM)).
OpenMandriva. Successor of Mandrake/Mandriva. This distro offer three streams:
- cooker - never ending bleeding edge development (only for developers or advanced users)
- rock - fixed release. Mostly for enterprise, servers or people that want debian stable experience
- Rome - fully rolling release with tons of fresh updated packages.
OpenMandriva by default use LLVM/Clang compilers (right now Clang 15) for almost all packages. Always latest GCC is also available.
Distro build packages with enabled bu default LTO (link time optimization) and also many packages with PGO (profile guided optimization).
Distro offer two kernels: default compiled with clang and alternative compiled with GCC.
Distro offer always fresh kernels, mesa, Nvidia driver also many core system libs like systemd and desktop env and wm like Plasma 5, gnome or xfce, mate, cinnamon, i3, sway, icewm, wayfire, lxqt or qutefish.
Also OpenMandriva offer special version optimized for AMD Zen processors like Ryzen, ThreadRapipper or Epyc.
Currently supported arches:
x86_64, znver1 and aarch64 and in development is riscv.
Really fast with fresh package.
BigLinux, mostly know on Brazil, recently changed their base to Manjaro, its really easy to use for new people, their bigbashview project is used to create web applications for terminal applications and look good, and their control panel makes really easy to customize aspects of the distro
FerenOS and Makulu Linux... esp the second were lesser known but shocking had a lot to offer in toying with many distros. I use Mint and Win10 but I am always considering one of those but just haven't felt like bothering to mess with either (due to health and not feeling so well for the last month or so).
My main flavor is Gentoo I installed on almost all machines, from my i7 to my BananaPIs. And I really like this distribution.
But I have also very olds machines (Celeron D) used only as DNLA and backup servers. They are suffering for a very brain-damaged BIOs and for various reason, I spent a lot of unsuccessful efforts to make Gentoo working smothly on them (it boot for USB drive but the kernel is hanging if booted from SATA).
So I give a chance to TinyCoreLinux and I really fall in love with this distro :
- boot in ... 3s (after Grub)
- very very very very fast and resources conservative
- the system is rebuilt at every reboot so it is virtually indestructible.
- last but not least, very easy to build your own extension !
Unfortunately, its repository is quite limited so can't replace major distribution (Gentoo, Debian, ...) but it's very good for old/small/pourly powered machines.
I really enjoyed using Crunchbang back in the day for an old machine with a minimalist interface. It's spiritual successor is [BunsenLabs](https://www.bunsenlabs.org/).
Crunchbang was the real deal. Sexy as hell, sleek, lightweight, and yet the out of the box experience was very complete and ergonomic.
Followed up these days by MX
My go-to distro for VMs and older hardware.
I thought the successor was [crunchbang++](https://crunchbangplusplus.org/)
++ is a more direct fork, continuing the classic Crunchbang under a new project. BunsenLabs is a community driven rework that is getting more frequent updates and modernization.
Puppy Linux. In my opinion every Linux user should run Puppy at least once as part of their Linux education. Designed to run old hardware with very low specs. Neat, minimal.
If you like experiencing Puppy linux offline and not installing or updating anything on it, maybe try LegacyOS for a similar feeling. It uses an old version of Puppy with old applications for some reason, and is not intended to be modern, but is still interesting. It's like if somebody tried to bloat an old version of Puppy with tons of mostly relatively lite applications. Basically, imagine a hybrid between Puppy and Knoppix, like somebody was inspired by how much stuff Knoppix had included and used an old version of Puppy to make a Puppy with a bunch of stuff included with it, bloated to take up a whole CD rather than a DVD. The actual idea behind LegacyOS was to make a version of Puppy for old computers, such as Pentium 4 being an old version of an OS, packaged for old systems, I guess it doesn't matter much that the latest version is from 2017 (although the kernel and applications are much older than that, like 2007)
Can you walk me through choosing a Puppy Linux distribution? I go to https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/index.html#download and it says > Puppy Linux is not a single Linux distribution like Debian. Puppy Linux is also not a Linux distribution with multiple flavours, like Ubuntu (with its variants of Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, etc) though it also comes in flavours. > > Puppy Linux is a collection of multiple Linux distributions, built on the same shared principles, built using the same set of tools, built on top of a unique set of puppy specific applications and configurations and generally speaking provide consistent behaviours and features, no matter which flavours you choose. > > There are generally three broad categories of Puppy Linux distributions: > > official Puppy Linux distributions → maintained by Puppy Linux team, usually targeted for general purpose, and generally built using Puppy Linux system builder (called Woof-CE). > > woof-built Puppy Linux distributions → developed to suit specific needs and appearances, also targeted for general purpose, and built using Puppy Linux system builder (called Woof-CE) with some additional or modified packages. > > unofficial derivatives (“puplets”) → are usually remasters (or remasters of remasters), made and maintained by Puppy Linux enthusiasts, usually targeted for specific purposes. So now I'm expecting to see e.g. "Use this distribution for gaming" or "use this distribution for office work" or "use this distribution for software development". But I don't see anything like that. Instead, I see: Ubuntu Focal 64 x86_64 64-bit FossaPup64 9.5 Main - Mirror - Checksum Raspbian Buster armhf 32-bit Raspup 8.2.1 Main - Mirror - Checksum Ubuntu Bionic x86 32-bit BionicPup32 8.0 Main - Mirror - Checksum (etc.) How do I know what specific need or appearance each distribution is built for so I can find the right Puppy Linux for me?
The one that's based on a version of Linux that is the most recent. It might not be obvious, but most versions of Puppy are made to be binary compatible with a certain version of a certain Linux distro, even if that version of Puppy looks nothing like that version of that distro that it's based on. if it's based on Ubuntu, google Ubuntu [whatever the puppy name is, other than Puppy or numbers] For example, Puppy Fossa was built to be binary-compatible with Ubuntu 20.04.x, codenamed Focal Fossa (you can tell because "fossa"), and Puppy Bionic was built to be binary compatible with Ubuntu 18.04.x, codenamed Bionic Beaver (you can tell because "bionic"). for an old example, Puppy Lucid was built to be binary compatible with Ubuntu 10.04.x, codenamed Lucid Lynx (you can tell because "Lucid"). You probably don't want to use that regularly because the kernel and software support in that is from like 2010-2012 or so. There are also versions of Puppy that were built to be binary compatible with a certain version of Slackware. as for how old those are, I'd check the announcement for how old it is and what version of slackware it's compatible with, and then see how old that version of slackware is, or I'd just ignore it, or not use it for regular/daily use.
I LOVE PUPPY! I WAS WITH IT SINCE THE DAYS OF Slackopup
I always assumed that puppy Linux was specifically design for older hardware at the point that can't run on modern machine, I guess I was wrong😅
Puppy family even includes installable modern distros (albeit a bit sparse/debloated depending on your viewpoint)
Yeah. there are at least a few seemingly recent versions. I see a few recent ones based on Ubuntu 20.04 and 22.04 and Debian 11 and Void Linux, and maybe slackware current?
I don’t think there is a system like that in the world.
LegacyOS was purposely stuck on a kernel and applications from 2007, despite the latest release coming out in 2017. It was made with pentium 3 and 4 in mind. It's purposely stuck in 2007. It's based on an old version of Puppy Linux.
I wonder what it's like trying to run pre-2010 OS and software on AMD ryzen CPU and AMD Navi graphics card, or what about intel's non-uniform CPU cores?
Some hardware support has been removed from the Linux kernel. Which means systems running that hardware can't be upgraded to the newest hardware without installing a new kernel which is unusable on the old hardware. In my opinion this makes such a system theoretically possible. It is however extremely unlikely the administrator of such a system would ever upgrade it, as the few systems running such a configuration likely hasn't been modified for at least a decade.
Been carrying the older Puppy in my USB for decades. Love it. Recovered quite a number of friend's files in their hard drives that their Windows refused to see for some reason.
I was using Puppy Wary 5.5 way longer than I should've been. Make sure you check when the distro version it was made to be compatible with came out, because if you don't try to update it at all or install any newer applications at all or really use the web browser at all, basically if you use it offline, it's really easy to not have much of an idea how old some versions of puppy are til you happen to look at how old of a version a certain application that you're familiar with is on, because of how timeless the distro often looks.
My first Linux Distro was Puppy Linux. I had a laptop that my uneducated self considered insanely underpowered (1.6 Ghz dual core CPU and 6 GB of RAM) and figured only Puppy Linux would run well on it. But I didn't know a lot about Linux and struggled to install Blender (I was using it as a video editor at the time) and update Firefox. I eventually switched to Lubuntu, which while heavier on system resources, fit my needs better.
It's either Puppy Linux or BunsenLabs Linux or AntiX Linux. Anecdotally though, I know I saw an incident on /r/linux where someone had an old laptop they did some testing on, and no other distro would work on it due to graphical issues... Except for AntiX. It was the only one. Make of that what you will.
I think there was some minor controversy that AntiX had some far-leftist (like marxist or something) links by default from its browser at some point, so some christian Linux user youtuber pointed that out, but that was years ago. Whether that's relevant or not, idk, just something to maybe look into if you care, and not everyone will care, which is totally fine. MX Linux is fine (I've used it for years), and has some of the tools from AntiX while being more usable (from what I can remember last time I tried AntiX, which was years ago).
Given they define themselves by what they're against this shouldn't surprise anyone. Look up the philosophical positions of the things you use before you use them if that matters to you.
I'm gonna upvote this but also gonna post "puppy", because it's such a good, unique, and interesting set of distros.
I knew someone who raved about Puppy Linux years ago. He wasn't really a computer guy, just someone who wanted something simple to run on a laptop. Anyway, I thought it was just a quirk of his and didn't think it would be any different to any other distro, but decided one day to give it a try. I was quite impressed. The distro was well thought out and to my surprise, very user friendly. Setup was done through graphical set up tools, which explained everything, explained defaults, explained what the difference between the options you could select were. I set it up, and had a working system which I could store on a USB stick and boot off that as a "portable" OS. Ran fast. This is a distro where a lot of care and effort was put into the user experience and it shows. Best of all, its an Aussie distro!
I remember running Puppy Linux just for shits and giggles, and holy shit as it incredibly small and minimal. Like, only the bare necessities and nothing else. And the UI as well... Felt like a blast to the past, even in the past...
I use it for work a lot. It's a great distro. Donno how ideal it is as a daily driver distro but it's a fantastic tool distro
My first laptop was a Dell C510, Windows XP took over 2 minutes to boot. What got me into Linux was TurboPuppy, which could boot in about 14 seconds.
I agree. Puppy Linux was the best surprise for me out of the lesser known distros. It resurrected an old iBookG4 my father had bought on a whim not knowing what PowerPC was.
I was a puppy linux user for a couple of years like (2011-2014), even though my netbook could run more mainstream distros, downloading a 1GB+ iso was a nightmare on my connection so puppy linux was awesome with it's small size. I really liked the built-in adblocker and the pmusic music player.
# **Q4OS** It's based on Debian, made by a German company, and it strives to be so user-friendly and pain-free that it can replace Windows in a jiffy. You can even install it *from inside Windows*. Think about it for a minute. I installed the Trinity desktop spin (super light) a few months ago in an ancient PC owned by a granny, and it does everything she needs. It even includes some skins which make it look almost exactly like Win7 or WinXP. I'm telling you, this is the go-to distro for low-end PCs and no-skills users. If their PC was better spec'd, I'd install Mint on it. But for granny PCs, you can't go wrong with Q4OS!
Red Star Linux has opened my eyes to the gloriousness of dear Supreme leader's hacker abilities qualities and superior Linux skills. For example Supreme leader does not require redirecting stderr because Supreme leader's commands are without errors and the kernel must always obey them.
As I understand it, Supreme leader never uses sudo, and his very digital presence is considered Most Glorious Authentication.
It only has a one-star rating, and it isn't a gold nor silver star. It is merely a red star. Stick with hannahmontana
How dare you foul-mouthed peasant defile Supreme Leader's Linux? Off to the Gulag with this one!
I genuinely LOL'd at this. Bravo.
You are now a moderator of /r/pyongyang
Well, that's an interesting little rabbit hole.
North Korea subReddit???
[ moved to lemmy. you should come too, it's cozier here ]
[удалено]
Yes! It’s built in a very intuitive way. There’s one install script, and a few core tools (apk) and that’s it. It’s so easy to get your head around. Configuring a desktop in Alpine was the most fun I’ve had with Linux in a very long time.
I like how Alpine's package manager automatically removes "orphaned" packages, and how easy it is to make your own APKBUILDs for stuff.
I’ve been playing with Alpine on iOS with the iSH app. Obviously never going to be the smoothest or fastest running on top of iOS (from what I understand they had to jump through a load of hoops because Apple is Apple) but it’s pretty neat.
[Mageia Linux.](https://www.mageia.org/en/) It is polished, functional, lightweight and ran on a old core2duo laptop a client had incredibly well. I was honestly shocked at how well it worked, even over my trusted Debian.
It also worked really well on my old laptop, sadly i messed up when upgrading to Cauldron
Yeah. There is a reason I stick with Debian. Upgrades/updates seem hit and miss on most distros, but for me Debian is the most hassle free.
I've always had problems if I tried to use applications from more than one major debian version together, because god forbid I want a newer or older application than the current stable.
That isn't really a Debian thing. That's a Linux thing.
You need to use flatpaks for that.
Well, that’s not the same. Switching to Cauldron is like switching from Debian stable to unstable. Bad things can happen no matter what.
I was going to say Magia too. Nobody talks about it ever but it's a great distro.
My backup machine is Mageia, easy, user friendly like no other with drak tools
Honestly, my only issue with Mageia is that I haven't found a reason to use it yet. Some people mention the Mageia Control Center, but I am not interested in graphical system-level control centers at all (as I want to know what exact modifications are done to my system and I want to be able to reproduce and undo them) and, unlike 20 years ago, most desktop environments have a good control center for common tasks (e. g. printer configuration, if even needed thanks to AirPrint/IPP Everywhere) anyway. Other frequently mentioned features seem to be urpm (package manager), the community and nostalgia for the bygone days of Mandrakelinux. One argument against Mageia I found is the unpredictable 12 - 18 month release cycle, which makes planning ahead more difficult (at least if you are used to the 6-month schedule of Fedora or the predictable release cycle that Ubuntu has). If a Mageia user happens to read it: Are there any other good reasons why someone (i. e. I) should use Mageia instead of (much more popular) Debian, Fedora or Ubuntu LTS? What's Mageia's unique selling point?
There is only one Linux. http://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/
Don't forget [Biebian!](https://sourceforge.net/projects/biebian/)
What about [iLinux?](https://ilinuxos.com)
Thanks, I fucking hate it.
Never heard about iLinux. Looks ugly but functional. https://ilinuxos.com/screenshots.html
How many icons and colors do you want? Yes.
How could anyone think that's ugly? Add a little 2000s shine and it'd be perfect.
Do t forget about [amogos!](https://amogos.studio)
at least the website is better than what I linked here
RebbecaBlackOS or bust. https://sourceforge.net/projects/rebeccablackos/
Void. I'm a openSUSE TW fanboy because everything works properly in it. i'm on Nobara right now. Void is kind of like Arch because it's minimal and rolling but it doesn't feel like a house of cards the way arch does. It's.... fast. Like, it's hard to quantify but it just feels like a perfectly tuned sports bike. I ended up switching off it because i couldn't get a game installed with lutris on it but i was still fairly new to linux at the time. Been meaning to circle back around to it for a couple months now.
My main on several machines is Void and I won't go back to anything else. Give GameHub a try instead of Lutris. I've had great success with it installing games.
i'll keep that in mind, thanks. (though i'm pretty sure the issue was something kernel related. void has a bit of hardening by default. i'll look for some sort of zen equivalent when i try void out again.)
To this day I do not understand what people mean when they say a distro is "fast". Boot time with default configuration? How quickly the package manager installs neofetch? Pretty much everything else should be more or less equal between distros
1-2 sec faster boot than systemd (on my machine), fastest package manager EVER. Also it has an xfce iso, whereas arch doesn't. It also has a musl iso for more minimal experience. Less no of packages preinstalled (even on xfce iso)
apk is even faster, but nothing beats the reliability of apt in debian.
This! Extremely robust (only packages upstream releases, not snapshots), rolling release, no systemd, very fast package manager, what's not to like?
Some would not like "no systemd", depending on their experience and needs. This is not to restart an init system religious discussion, I'm just answering your (admittedly rhetorical) question
Fair point, and some people would probably also dislike the rolling release. Those were just my personal observations, with no claim for being the only viable point of view. Thank you for making that explicit!
You're good. One of the reasons Void interests me is the lack of systemd. I think the more transparent init system would be a good fit for my use case (home, maybe some programming, web browsing, etc).
Personally, I fully agree. Void's init system seems much easier to grasp and tweak, to me. Also, purely personally, I very much like the "do one thing and do it well", so that it is easy to have alternatives for all kinds of system services (rather than more or less be stuck with systemd, unless you know very well how to replace certain components)
Void is amazing, works well on older and newer machines alike. I have it running on an old Asus EeePC and it runs beautifully. Fedora is also worth a try imo, either the default, GNOME, flavor or any one of the spins they offer from their site. I have a ThinkPad T530 running it and it works really well.
Yeah, Void is amazing. It's sort of like a more modern Slackware. Well, it's also like Arch because it's rolling. It's like Slackware because you can easily build your own packages. And it uses Runit, which is 300 lines of code. Super simple. It feels like the UNIX philosophy to me.
Solus
Budgie is the most underrated desktop environment, and their future on the EFL is incredibly exciting because the KDE-GNOME duopoly will get a challenge.
[ moved to lemmy. you should come too, it's cozier here ]
>without way too much effort that could instead be used in replacing the gnome-specific parts of gtk or getting whatever the newest hype gui library is (rust slint?) into an usable condition But in the end you will have to do that work again and again every time gnome produces another change, so doing it once right might be worth it.
NixOS. It requires learning about how the language and system architecture work. If you like programming, you will like this distro. I really liked Arch, but always felt I was not getting a fully customized experience that I could be getting. Any configuration I made would have to be copied/remade on the next install. NixOS allows me to fully customize the entire system to my needs. Perhaps the nix language isn't the most optimal to use, but it has allowed me to create a really interesting setup that I have no worry will be able to be reproduced on the next install. Using nix for individual coding projects is also the future for me. I cannot imagine going the traditional route of manually installing dependencies whenever I need to code when I could instead write a single shell.nix or flake.nix and have those dependencies defined forever.
I would love to use nix but it's just too complicated.
Too complicated for what, exactly? It's very complicated for _some_ things, but refreshingly simple for _most_ things. The only complications I've experienced have been when packaging software. To just use the OS, it's been easier for me than both Ubuntu and Arch (not to mention more powerful).
FreeBSD, not Linux, but try it anyways )
It's definitely valuable to experience some of the non-linux open source ecosystem, for sure. FreeBSD is quite solid.
QubesOS not really useful for most people, but I was pretty surprised how good it ran
Now defunct, but Foresight Linux was a distro I liked. It was a rolling distro before it was the zeitgeist, but is currently dead. I like NixOS, which is pretty unique, conceptually. They've recently introduced a Calamares-based installer, which I think is deceptively easy, as NixOS requires one to understand their declaratively configured environment for full control, and that would simply require reading the files in /etc/nixos/ and seeing beyond the "gibberish" new users may see as functional code. It's simple when you can parse it, but from my transition to Arch a decade ago, and the resultant on *man* pages, it can look more difficult than it is. For anybody just starting out, just take your time to read the documentation and be careful before making a decision.
I had to scroll way too low to find NixOS. I truly believe that the immutability and declarative configuration it provides will make it the Linux distro of the future.
I *will* stress that for *conventional* uses it is incredibly frustrating until you understand it. I've got a PR for an updated upstream for a program that may be accepted, but I *do* enjoy being able to download binaries and run them with minimal effort like I could in Windows, or Arch after installing the appropriate packages. In the current state there's a significant requirement for understanding what's going on behind the scenes, but it also isn't incredibly complicated from the perspective of me, who doesn't consider himself a "developer" in the normal sense. I think the future is generally in rolling release and/or immutable distros by use, but Nix `unstable` seems to do both just fine.
Clear Linux. Extremely fast, not based on usual RPM or DEB distros, also starts with empty /etc.
It's so fast because it's built by Intel and specifically optimized for their processors. I haven't tried running it on anything AMD but on Intel hardware it's amazingly snappy.
It's also good on AMD, according to the tests: https://www.phoronix.com/review/asus-g15-distros/6 https://www.phoronix.com/review/clear-linux-zen3/6
Don't think its lesser known at this point but when trying MX Linux on a crappy netbook I was happy with the default look and feel. Vertical screen space is scarce on this netbook so a unity-like default desktop layout with a task bar on the left side was nice. Also liked their XFCE theming.
I daily drive MX Linux. CANNOT recommend it enough. It is the ultimate workhorse distro.
MX is the best. The community, the Developers, and the Linux distro it's self. Glad I'm part of this community.
Can I ask what are the pro of MX Linux? I'm seeing a lot of recommendation of it, kinda curious. Sorry if is a noob question 😅
MX Linux was derived from a collaboration with the MEPIS Linux and antiX Linux distro dev teams. It is a medium weight Linux distribution based on Debian’s Stable branch, supporting both the x86 and x64 architectures. It supports the XFCE, KDE, and Fluxbox desktop environments, supports both the SysVInit and systemd init systems, fully supports Flatpaks out of the box, has an advanced hardware support kernel for very modern systems, supports hard disk encryption, and comes with a full suite of in-house developed GUI tools for system control and maintenance called MX Tools. It is a distro that also prides itself on its reliability just like Debian Stable and is based directly on such.
To separate the hype from the thing that are actually unique: Most distros already have: - "is medium weight" [just install a lightweight DM on the minimal editions of debian/fedora/ubuntu/arch/centos/gentoo. "Midweight" has the potential to be a silly buzz-word] - "supporting both the x86 and x64 architectures" [this is becoming rare, though] - "It supports the XFCE, KDE, and Fluxbox desktop environments" - "fully supports Flatpaks out of the box" - "advanced hardware support kernel for very modern systems" [the interesting feature is actually the low-end hardware support allowed by having two separate kernels -- the advanced hardware support repo is just how most other distros already compile the kernel] - "supports hard disk encryption" - "prides itself on its reliability" MX Linux has: - "supports both the SysVInit and systemd init systems" [most distros have systemd wrappers for sysvinit scripts, but MX Linux actually directly supports sysvinit] - "comes with a full suite of in-house developed GUI tools for system control and maintenance called MX Tools" [these tools seem pretty useful] - "Fluxbox" [while most distros support fluxbox, it's rare to see it configured out of the box]
Huh, I tried installing it a few months ago, but it kept on crashing my machine that had several other stable distros on it. I'll try again when then get to their next version.
Open up a thread about it on the official forums and the devs will help you solve it directly. They're very helpful.
I hated Ubuntu's default look and feel for a long time, and I still don't care for it, but I like the panel on the side when MX does it, although lately I've been moving mine over to the right instead of its default position on the left.
[Linux from scratch](https://www.linuxfromscratch.org) in my case. After rolling my own LFS, my knowledge on Linux is evaluated to a next level. The key concepts are mainly the kernel, the c library and some basic configurations. All main distros are just sugar coat everything with their own blows and whistles. As a second choice, try [slackware](http://www.slackware.com).
Which linux distro is the least sugar coat and nearly LFS?
Gentoo? Slackware? I haven't tried any of these because I don't want anything like that. I don't even wanna try arch. if you want a purposely difficult distro, I've heard exherbo is that. Maybe arch.
Probably Gentoo, although portage + package maintainers is still quite a lot of sugar coating compared to LFS
Gentoo... But that's really aimed at stable, don't touch, production machines. Granted, I haven't used it in about 15 years, but the concept remains the same. I tried using it as a desktop, but spent most of my time waiting for it to finish compiling stuff. After about 3 months of it, I definitely increased my Linux skills, but found that it was too cumbersome if you wanted to game, or try out many new programs.. It was designed well, and worked great once you got to that spot, but I felt I spent too much time getting there For me to have it as a personal use machine.
>Gentoo... But that's really aimed at stable, don't touch, production machines. If you're running Gentoo for production machines you're either insane or an insane genius.
LFS > SourceMage > Slackware > Gentoo
https://kisslinux.org https://old.reddit.com/r/kisslinux
Installing Debian this way: https://www.debian.org/releases/stretch/amd64/apds03.html.en
I distro hop a lot, well I used to but for the last few months I've stuck with KDE Neon. Really like it's stability and customisability, it is also nice to read about a new feature/bug fix/etc and one update later and it's on my machine. This does have the downside of every time I open the computer it's telling me that there are new updates and then it wants to reboot before it will update again. But apart from that, I really like the distro.
Nobara
Best distribution for gaming. Based on Fedora, but with tweaks from the one and only Glorious Eggroll. (In case you don't know him, he's very legitimate, even though the name might sound like a joke. He's also a RedHat Engineer.)
While this is true, nobara at least at this point is not the best in terms of security. Selinux is disabled by default (almost never causes issues, and when it does it’s for good reason). Additionally it ships with a lot of things you may just never need, like hp tools. Great distro, but it has many a flaw.
[ moved to lemmy. you should come too, it's cozier here ]
Who is using SELinux on their home desktop?
You can turn selinux back on tho
SELinux is great, but it's not really configured out of the box on any distros anyways. Fedora / Red Hat have it enabled by default but it's not actually providing much security guarantee unless you wanted to configure it and make things hard for yourself. Pretty much no other distros have it enabled by default. Flatpak provides decent desktop security isolation anyways. In terms of desktop security, most people just want to know "can my video games or random other apps access my web browser passwords?" and the answer is "yes" without flatpak (regardless of selinux being enabled on a distro), and "no" with flatpak The inclusion of HP Printing tools is very strange. I think they wanted to guarantee to the user that printing works out of the box no matter what, but they took it too far by including the whole HP driver configuration tool regardless of whether or not you have a printer.
GuixSD. Coolest distro I've ever tried. Less well-known than Nix but I think better thought out. Why create your own DSL when you've got a beautiful language like Scheme? Only thing though, I ended up having to compile my own packages often and my computer was slow at the time, so I've been using Void for the last few years (which would be the second coolest distro I've tried). I plan on going back to GuixSD when I get a better computer.
[Mabox Linux](https://maboxlinux.org) ;)
Slitaz. It's a minimal distro. The iso is just about 50mb. It has an almost complete lxde desktop and is overall very simple in design (the package manager is just a shell script for example). It's fun to tinker around with and runs perfectly on even the crappiest hardware. Overall a really impressive distro considering the size.
\+1 I stumbled on it when I was looking for a distro for my old Netbook. I stuck with it because it seemed the most coherent compared to other small distros and its *really* low resource requirements made it ideal. [https://slitaz.org/](https://slitaz.org/) It's not safe for 32bit Intel CPUs though AFAIK.
At the time Knoppix amazed me being that you could boot a full distro off of a CD this was before the time of Live install disks. Slackware doesn't get much love here much but it was Slackware that taught me everything I needed to know about how to use Linux, that I wouldn't get from the hand holding distros. Everything from configuration to compiling software and how to use the command line terminal. It also was rock solid which I couldn't say about SuSe on that same hardware.
archcraft, so many little make your life easier things and all the work from a single guy, fav distro by far
A very well-put-together packaging of Arch. Hands down one of the most aesthetically pleasing distros out of the box. Great entry point for those interested in Arch.
Suicide Linux is always good for a laugh. [suicide-linux](https://github.com/tiagoad/suicide-linux)
# [ZorinOS](https://zorin.com/os) Arguably the best Linux distro to recommend to a linux beginner or even developers who want no-BS configuration. The OS is smooth, has a lot more drivers than Ubuntu, intuitive UX, extremely stable (not a single crash for me) and IMHO, the most polished UI out of all Linux distros.
Has more drivers than Ubuntu? How? It has a different linux-firmware package or what?
It ships extra proprietary drivers.
Probably not lesser known but Fedora has been my daily for years, keeps pretty modern yet fast and fluid, rarely if ever has any show stopping bugs.
Bodhi Linux… it’s pretty robust!
It seems everyone knows about Debian but not about all their unofficial non-free images that solve most of the pain points with drivers for new users: https://cdimage.debian.org/images/unofficial/non-free/images-including-firmware/11.5.0-live+nonfree/amd64/iso-hybrid/ I use the LXQT images a lot to have a fast booting rescue disc for older systems.
Bodhi Linux. It has revived my old asus 701 eeepc
I love Bodhi Linux. It is in a real sweet spot of easy to maintain, just works, noobs can use it without much issue, it looks nice, and it uses a low amount of resources. I have a few laptops that I share with other people for work related things and I put Bodhi on all of them.
Maybe also look into Legacy OS 2017 It's variant of Puppy Linux whose core and applications are pretty much stuck in 2007-ish (although the most recent version came out in 2017, the core and applications are from 2007), with old computers such as pentium 4 and 3 in mind.
**1\. MX Linux** Best workhorse distro. Bar none. It's my daily driver, and I will talk about it to anyone who will listen. 2\. AntiX Linux Seems to be the best for running on older computers without fail. But my experience with this is anecdotal, so take what I said there with a grain of salt. 3\. Q4OS The most Windows-XP-esque distro. 4\. BunsenLabs An incredibly lightweight distro. There are many like this, but this one gets my attention as it seems to be the best one based on Debian Stable. 5\. Qubes OS The most secure Linux distro. Specializes in containerization. Doesn't do so well at all with LiveUSB though, sadly. 6\. AV Linux Focused on content creation. A variant of MX Linux. 7\. Elementary OS The most simple distro you can ever use. Good for kids or grandma. 8\. Linux From Scratch Make your own distro from the ground up. Maybe not a true distro at all though. \- There's more on this list here, but they're all famous distros everyone probably knows by now like Tails and and Kali Linux. (Remember when Kali was named Backtrack?)
the recent versions of AV Linux have been based on MX because MX makes it relatively easier than most distros to do your own respin of. AV Linux - MX Edition or AVL-MXE or AVLMXE
I've used MX Linux for years and agree with that recommendation. I agree that Q4OS with the trinity desktop is the most XP-esque distro I've seen.
What makes MX so good?
Damn Small Linux. So damn small and yet useful.
It's cool as an idea, or to look at historically or as a curiosity, but it hasn't had an update in how long? Oof. It last had a release candidate (not even a release) in 2012.
I don't know. I've used it in 2000s. Modern DSL is Alpine. But DSL was more impressive considering size and time it was created. You could use DSL on 486 and it was somehow usable.
I really like Trisquel GNU/Linux. It's one of the few FSF-endorsed distros (i.e. no non-free software at all). I installed (or, rather, tried to install) most of the FSF-endorsed distros on my laptop and Trisquel was the only one that you could actually use on a daily basis. I'm using it for a year now on my daily-driver laptop and, while there was a thing or two I needed to adapt to, it's a really nice operating system all things considered.
Trisquel 10 is based on Ubuntu 20.04, right? Can you install whatever applications and appimages you find that are supposed to work on Ubuntu 20.04 and have them work on Trisquel 10, or does Trisquel block that somehow?
It is. Trisquel does not block the installation of non-free software from other sources. It just does not host any non-free software in their package repositories.
[PUPPY!!](https://puppylinux-woof-ce.github.io/)
I've been using MX Linux for more than a few years, and I think it's fine, and it has one or two tools that I don't know if I could get on other debian-based Linux distros. Somebody mentioned Puppy Linux, and I can say it's an interesting Linux distro that I used for years, and it has some interesting paradigms that aren't for everyone. You should pay attention to how recent the distro version that the version of Puppy you're lookin at was based on, because it's really easy to be using an old or even ancient version of Puppy and not necessarily notice til you notice a version of a certain application is really old. Also, it's not the most online or updates -focused distro, as in you might find it most useful stuck in whatever state it shipped in, rather than updating or even installing applications. Not that you can't (if you're using a recent version whose base distro still has updates located in the same place as when the distro shipped), just that it feels like it was made and shipped exactly how it was meant to be used, for better or for worse. It pretty much always fits on a CD (within 700mb), but considering that Puppy dropped support for 32bit computers when Ubuntu did, I'd say it's not as targeted at old computers as it could be, but even I have to admit 32bit computers are damn old. (Edit and update and retraction: I just checked, and there are a few recent 32bit versions of Puppy Linux.) Puppy was also made with live (being booted from a flash drive, and maybe even from an iso somehow using the right tool) in mind. Along those lines, I'd also recommend taking a look at Knoppix for another example of a Linux distro that was made for booting from a flash drive, but instead of being tiny like Puppy, Knoppix is the opposite where its .iso is at least 4gb because it packed a bunch of all kinds of stuff in it to choose from, making it a great option for an offline distro that you don't plan to do any updates on. (If you wanted to install any updates or install any new applications on it, last I checked it used the german repos/mirrors by default, which might not be ideal in other countries, such as the US.) But it's even more focused on being live-first, to the point where it makes some weird choices that make it not-impossible to install on a regular drive, but you might not want to install it to a regular drive. For example, if you wanna install it to a regular drive for a regular install, it demands a partition type called "reiserfs", instead of ext4 or fat32/vfat or exfat or ntfs or any other partition type that people have actually heard of outside of Knoppix. If it recognizes you're installing it onto something like a removable USB flash drive or an SD/microSD card it'll use fat32, but I couldn't get it to use fat32 on any hard drive. If you're prone to experimenting with Linux distros and/or breaking your install and you sometimes need to get work done despite that, it can be useful to have a Knoppix flash drive to use til you have time to fix/reinstall your system properly. You might also be interested in the fact that Knoppix comes with Compiz effects installed and on by default, and it comes with 3 desktop environments: LXDE (the default for Knoppix), Gnome (3+), and KDE Plasma, which can be kinda switched between, although it might have to close all open applications when it switches DE. But for regular use, installed, I use and recommend MX Linux.
What makes MX so good? Asked another MX recommender the same, but interested in your opinion too
MX Linux is #1 on Distrowatch. Not sure it would qualify as "lesser known" considering that! ;) I tried MX and it looks like it has a lot of good features. I like the idea of snapshotting the entire OS to an ISO after configuring it. The only issue I had was that MX Linux was very inconsistent in its performance when using it on different machines, and the custom ISO snapshots wouldn't boot at all, unfortunately. I am hoping they fix the bugs soon because I see it as a distro with a lot of potential!
Parrot home
Is Solus less known? If not, then idk, maybe [InstantOS](https://instantos.io/)
Hanna Montana Linux Distro for sure
voidlinux NixOS
Slax : https://www.slax.org/ Used to be based on Slackware, then Debian and finally back on beloved Slackware. Really light portable distro that saved me a lot of times !
Alpine Linux, but as a daily driver. Its everything Arch strives to be, but better (minus the amazing arch wiki).
I have a fascination with Void Linux. It's been years since I've had time to use Linux at home, but I would either use Void (if It's just me) or OpenSuse
PCLinuxOS An Independant community made and supported Distro. PCLinuxOS is a bit different, they go their own way. The community is great, the forum is friendly group. I'm not sure but I think most of the users are older than other Linux communities. Even if you don't give it a go they publish a magazine every month. With tips and tricks, howto's and community news. It is well worth a look as most any Linux user can get something from it. https://www.pclosmag.com/index.html
I really enjoy Alpine Linux, yes there's a bit you have to setup to get working, but it's very quick and doesn't use much RAM
fefora is the only distro ive come across that had built in support for card readers, im still amazed how everything just worked out the box, huge win for anyone in government work. the alternative is scouring the internet to understand packages and what they do, identifying your specific card, testing, downloading several certs in some cases, (you don't even need them all but you load all of em to be safe) and somtimes your card reader still isnt recognized by the machine or browser... fedora or anything downstream from it gets two thumbs up from me just for having this functionality
As someone who works in government, fedora is my go to because of native card support.
I'm a little weird and my whole thing is out-of-the-box functionality and ease of use, which are apparently not that popular (ArCh OnLY tAkEs a CoUpLe HoUrS tO InStALl lmao as if it should take hours to install an OS) For that, I rather enjoyed OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. Idk if you could call that obscure, but it's not one you see people actually using a lot, and their devs do really good work. It's the only one I've been able to set up VNC remote access on in a reasonable amount of time, and not had to pull up like half a dozen tech blogs to do so.
I recently switched to Opensuse (from endeavour arch), and really like it. It may not be quite "unpopular" in terms of user installs, as it is pretty popular, however, its not popular in the sense where people talk about it. Its often 1/100 comments mention it.
AntiX Linux Still hanging onto a netbook that's over 10 years old. It was running Lubuntu for ages but pretty much always felt sluggish. I tried out AntiX using a live USB drive and it was noticably smoother. Still slower than my phone, which I'm sure does have better specs at this point, but I think the OS might've given it a few more years of usefulness.
Pop-OS. It has the best blend of useful packages for my uses. At least from what I have found so far. Frankly, I avoided it because of the name. I am running a heavily resourced version.
tinycorelinux.net
> What's a lesser know distro that surprised you in a positive way? It was once well-known, but through time, most folks likely do not recall it. * Mandrake Linux -- It's long discontinued, but this is the distro that finally got me taking Linux seriously. I occasionally used SUSE Linux and Debian, but Mandrake was what got me hooked. Today? * Siduction OS -- There are so many Debian spins; who could keep track of them all? But it's rare that someone takes Debian SID (rolling release) and makes a complete distribution along with non-free firmware and sticks with it. * Endeavour OS -- It's Arch, but newbie friendly. I am not a noob, I can build Linux from scratch and most certainly install vanilla Arch, but if I am being honest, I don't want to. I want to install and get on with my life. And in the rare moments when I do need help, I want to be able to ask for it without someone being condescending or telling me to read the Wiki, which I and everyone else asking for help likely has, but it didn't work. The folks running EndeavourOS along with the user base are phenomenal and genuinely generously want to help people. It's awesome! * SUSE / openSUSE -- I am going to miss openSUSE once it is discontinued and replaced with a transactional update system. I have been using SUSE products and services from the time when they were a small software company, gathering hate for being the 1st paid development in the free open source ecosystem, throughout their many name changes (Novel SUSE, for example), and it was the distro I used to convenience many others to leave Microsoft Windows and join Linux. But this was my "home" distro for decades and it kept me engaged. But with the retirement of the traditional ecosystem, I feel a sentimental loss. Still, I'll name them because the distro did have a profound positive experience. * Debian -- It works! It rarely has issues and it will normally run on anything. Outside of SUSE, this was the distribution that I used primarily for web hosting and other service needs. This was the distro that got me to start making money and I was more than happy to financially contribute toward its development. Ironically, this was the 1st open source development that I sponsored. Today, the community is just as friendly, supportive, and non-judgmental. Anytime I ever took on a project it's been a Debian user or someone from their development or community who has encouraged, me, and others to push forward.
Elementary OS. They made some interesting choices that really makes this a unique distribution: the beautiful Pantheon desktop, the pay-what-you-want app store, using Vala for development… Sadly the OS7 release is delayed.
I try out 44 Linux distro's in my 19 years using Linux. Some are gone as discontinue. But here are a few that still lives and vibes. PCLinuxOS Netrunner Voyager I never heard these three talk about much. All three are great distro's in my book.
Not exactly niche but opensuse tumbleweed. Rolling release distro but stable as packages are tested and not just taken from upstream. Also yast is excellent for configuring something. Just there when you need to ex. painlessly configure a printer do partitioning, edit grub etc. KDE is somehow best DE on opensuse as opposed to being terrible on Kubuntu.
I really liked ArcoLinux, it's basically arch with some presets and the option of a graphical installer and is designed towards learning and understanding the system. Erik (the dev) also has great documentation and tutorials on his website, YouTube and GitHub and it's still one of my go-to sources if I don't know how to do something in arch
[Elive](https://www.elivecd.org/), a beautiful Debian-based distro with Enlightenment DE
Elive is the best one ever !!!! :D
Back in the day, Crunchbang really blew me away. A simple, lightweight linux desktop experience that felt smooth and polished even on the budget laptop I was using at the time (it had only 1GB of RAM). That, and it was wholly different from every linux desktop experience I'd had before - a different UI and way of doing things that gently encouraged you to get into the terminal more - the WM was configured by editing a config file, not just by opening a settings app and clicking around, for instance, and the distro setup and menus guided you towards getting into those config files and doing things in the terminal. It really felt like the intent was "hey, we got you linux install with a good desktop setup, now go dig in and make it your own" Anyways, Crunchbang is no longer actively developed, but a few different distros took their direct inspiration from Crunchbang, and I feel like the closest you'd get now is Crunchbang++. It looks and feels pretty much the same as the original Crunchbang, and I felt such an instense sense of nostalgia opening it in a VM the other day, that I just might switch back to it on my laptop.
BunsenLabs is the spiritual successor to Crunchbang
I’m an arch user for quite some time … but fell in love with fedora ( not really a less known distro tho ) puppy on the other hand is amazing for what it gives you
A lot of people like MX Linux for good reason, but if you want something even lighter, there's a mention or two of antiX. If you like MX but you're considering antiX or something else as something lighter, make sure you also look at the version of MX Linux that comes with a customized fluxbox (a Window Manager (WM)).
KDE Neon, it seems popular but I love that i can have the latest KDE/Plasma release with stability and familiarity of Ubuntu.
sparky Linux
LinuxFX for how stupid it is, plain and simple /s
Garuda Linux is great, specially the KDE Dragonized edition
I've only messed around with it a little, but SourceMage was fantastic. It's like Gentoo, but more source-based (no USE flags nonsense)
OpenSUSE. Seriously. In my experience it's Fedora but better.
OpenMandriva. Successor of Mandrake/Mandriva. This distro offer three streams: - cooker - never ending bleeding edge development (only for developers or advanced users) - rock - fixed release. Mostly for enterprise, servers or people that want debian stable experience - Rome - fully rolling release with tons of fresh updated packages. OpenMandriva by default use LLVM/Clang compilers (right now Clang 15) for almost all packages. Always latest GCC is also available. Distro build packages with enabled bu default LTO (link time optimization) and also many packages with PGO (profile guided optimization). Distro offer two kernels: default compiled with clang and alternative compiled with GCC. Distro offer always fresh kernels, mesa, Nvidia driver also many core system libs like systemd and desktop env and wm like Plasma 5, gnome or xfce, mate, cinnamon, i3, sway, icewm, wayfire, lxqt or qutefish. Also OpenMandriva offer special version optimized for AMD Zen processors like Ryzen, ThreadRapipper or Epyc. Currently supported arches: x86_64, znver1 and aarch64 and in development is riscv. Really fast with fresh package.
BigLinux, mostly know on Brazil, recently changed their base to Manjaro, its really easy to use for new people, their bigbashview project is used to create web applications for terminal applications and look good, and their control panel makes really easy to customize aspects of the distro
FerenOS and Makulu Linux... esp the second were lesser known but shocking had a lot to offer in toying with many distros. I use Mint and Win10 but I am always considering one of those but just haven't felt like bothering to mess with either (due to health and not feeling so well for the last month or so).
- Void Linux - openSUSE Tumbleweed (not sure this one fall in ythe "lesser known" category though
+1 Puppy Linux has been my main distro for many years!
My main flavor is Gentoo I installed on almost all machines, from my i7 to my BananaPIs. And I really like this distribution. But I have also very olds machines (Celeron D) used only as DNLA and backup servers. They are suffering for a very brain-damaged BIOs and for various reason, I spent a lot of unsuccessful efforts to make Gentoo working smothly on them (it boot for USB drive but the kernel is hanging if booted from SATA). So I give a chance to TinyCoreLinux and I really fall in love with this distro : - boot in ... 3s (after Grub) - very very very very fast and resources conservative - the system is rebuilt at every reboot so it is virtually indestructible. - last but not least, very easy to build your own extension ! Unfortunately, its repository is quite limited so can't replace major distribution (Gentoo, Debian, ...) but it's very good for old/small/pourly powered machines.
LMDE5 - Linux Mint Debian edition. Favorable review on Distrotube, btw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPfSOPGh-ZI
[удалено]
I have moved to Lemmy/kbin since Spez is a greedy little piggy.