I occasionally see love for niche small distros, instead of the major ones…
And it just seems to me like there’s more hurdles than help when it comes to adopting an OS whose users number in the hundreds or dozens. I can understand trying one for fun in a VM, but I prefer sticking to the bigger distros for my daily drivers since the they’ll support more software and not be reliant on upstream sources, and any bugs or other issues are more likely to be documented abd have workarounds/fixes.
So: What distro do you daily drive and why? What drove you to choose it?
I shouldn’t talk because I dip in and out, but I do that because I like the possibilities. Like, what if someone comes up with a concept, but no one tries it, and it turns out to really work? Like, I like immutability as a concept, so I’ve tried Silverblue, Kinoite, and Bazzite. If nobody gave it a go, then the concept would die on the vine.
Also, I like seeing different ways of thinking about technology.
I wouldn’t say it’s a full on daily, but Bunsenlabs distros. It started out with Lithium because they had a non PAE build and I needed it for an old Pentium M laptop. I ended up really liking it. It’s debian at the end of the day so software support is plentiful. It’s super lightweight. It ran on the pentium m laptop (only 1 gb of ram) without much issue. It’s also baby’s first foray into window managers as it used openbox.
I ended up installing it on my other old laptop that has an 8th gen i7. I’ve been pretty happy with it as a result.
I.have 2 gripes but idk if it’s Bunsenlabs’s fault. I had an nvme ssd that refused to play ball with it, a Samsung PM991A nvme ssd. I couldnt work with it at all. Using gparted to format it was a no go as Gparted would just die. I know that line of ssds is problematic in the hackintosh community. Not surprised that it sucks here. Also trying to disable the lid close is impossible. Tried cli, can’t find my lid close sensor. It might be because it’s a x360 laptop so it’s a lot more complex lid detection wise.
I had an nvme ssd that refused to play ball with it, a Samsung PM991A nvme ssd
Did other NVMe drives work? I wonder if it’s using an outdated NVMe driver… Was the kernel old?
I honestly haven’t tried any other nvme ssds with it because it’s such a pain to install new ones in that computer. It’s a motherboard removed procedure. I have an sn850x that Id want to try with it. It was on bookworm so an updated kernel.
Why? Why not?
Currently running Debian Stable, but in the process of switching over to Alpine (yes, Alpine on the desktop). The lightweight, stripped-down feel calls to me and I like the little BSD-isms thrown in. musl might present problems down the road, but a lot can be bypassed by using flatpaks. Also using the change as incentive to try out Wayland and LabWC (bringing back that Openbox goodness). Kinda enjoying the process of piecing stuff together rather than trying to pare it down afterwards.
It’s like Linux From Scratch… with friends. Every distro has a purpose. I haven’t done super niche. One day I’ll probably try to run Gentoo much more seriously, and maybe an LFS just to see if I can.
Linux is the realm of all computer science students when it comes time to learn about operating systems, processes, threading, interrupts, schedulers, memory, etc. All levels exist I’m this space. The major distros all have underlying reasons they exist too. It is not branding/marketing like much of the consumer world.
I really like immutable distros, and am currently using NixOS. I feel like despite still being relatively obscure, NixOS is a bit of an outlier since it has more packages than any other distro and is (so far) the only distro I’ve used that has never broken. There is a steep learning curve, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it for non programmers, but it is something truly different than all mainstream Linux distros while being extremely reliable.
