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We all know about Debian, Fedora and Arch but what about the lesser known ones that are built from the ground up?

I’m going to say Alpine/postmarketos. The reason I say both is pmos uses Alpine as a base, but a lot of the code is built from the ground up as its a linux distro designed to run on mostly ARM devices (old phones and tablets. Even some old iOS devices!)

In addition to alpine id also throw nixos in.

It’s a real niche OS with a very different approach to setup and configuration than any other I’ve seen and tested. It’s now my server Linux and after more than a year I’m still not sure if I would recommend it 😂

Hannah Montana Linux

There’s the Mandriva successors: Mageia, OpenMandriva Lx, PCLinuxOS and ROSA Linux. As far as I know, they are completely independent projects, even if they started as Mandriva forks.

I’ve been using NixOS for my laptop and servers for over a year and I’m totally obsessed with it. While I upvoted you for visibility, I wouldn’t really call NixOS obscure anymore. I’m constantly seeing it randomly mentioned in various distro-agnostic Linux spaces online lately.

I’m running Gallium OS on an old Chromebook … it’s a dead distro at this point, and getting a bit frightfully outdated, but it’s the only distro specifically made for that hardware.

NixOS has a lot of visibility, probably because the basic concept is so appealing to people who like to tinker with their OS. But its user base is still tiny.

slackware, gentoo, crux maybe

there are stuff like tinycore too

GNU Guix System is independent I think. Interesting distro, but not for the faint of heart.

GoboLinux, Crux, Void.

Am gonna say Adélie Linux.
Tbh the only cool feature about it is the architecture support.

Am gonna say Adélie Linux.
Tbh the only cool feature about it is the architecture support.

TempleOS should be obscure, but everyone knows about it because it’s such a joke.

Not Linux tho

I’ve got a really obscure one.

Anyone here heard about FLI4L? Floppy ISDN for Linux? Built from the ground up to be usable on your really old PC as a router. Originally it fit on a single floppy disc and was able to turn a 386 into a modem or ISDN router. Later they added the ability to route between LANs and DSL.

By now the requirements have been raised to super beefy 586 PCs. It probably doesn’t fit on a floppy disc anymore.

I can see where you’re coming from! Specifically this community though I’ve not seen it a lot - you’re completely right though, the more native one becomes the more one is confronted with it.

I’m still struggling with the slowness of things (e.g. a quick endpoint change) and I can’t get my head around reason error messages “fluently”, i.e. I have to think about what the errors want to tell me instead of resolving it - a bit like old python stuff really.

And then there are the edge cases ….. It took me a long time to change the config the very first time while offline - which makes sense from a model perspective but from my user brain it was just … wrong :D

Perhaps I should switch my clients as well to get more exposure….

puppy linux! an entire live graphical desktop system with browser and office suite compressed to fit in 300MB, so you can run it from RAM and use the USB for storage.

Trisquel GNU/Linux is a libre distro with zero proprietary software and zero obfuscated binary-blobs used in drivers.

So the entire codebase of your distro is visible and readable.

Based on Ubuntu, so it gets the best of Debian and Ubuntu, and then strips out the non-free cruft and possible exploits.

My first contact with Linux i still love it…

That’s just an old Ubuntu with a theme.

Alpine is not really obscure, it’s THE clustering distro… Even Microsoft delivers alpine docker images for their dotnet stuff

What about OpenSolaris and OpenBSD? Not technically linux, but more obscure, I think.

Here’s the list of all 59 independent Linux distros from distrowatch.com:
https://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=Linux&category=All&origin=All&basedon=Independent&notbasedon=None&desktop=All&architecture=All&package=All&rolling=All&isosize=All&netinstall=All&language=All&defaultinit=All&status=Active#simpleresults

I have a copy of one called Poe-Lina Linux on a CD somewhere in storage. This is one of the few sites I’ve found about it (sorry, all Japanese, it came in a book I bought when I lived there), and here is a brief video of it.

Based on Ubuntu

So not fitting the “built from the ground up” criteria asked by OP.

Wow, a Japanese version of Knoppix, which I think is German and sadly dead. I think you won the obscurity prize.

Solus OS is build from scratch.

Bedrock Linux.

Slackware, Gentoo, the Mandriva family (OpenMandriva, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, ROSA, ALT Linux), Void, Alpine, Chimera, Venom, CRUX, Exherbo, Paldo, the PiSi family (PiSi Linux, old versions of Pardus), and Solus (eopkg is a fork of PiSi).

Chimera!! https://chimera-linux.org/

Knoppix might be dead? That sucks. It was my first exposure to Linux. A family member who never participated in holiday gift-giving and almost never visited suddenly visited one day when I was young. I don’t remember much of the visit, but he left me with a Linux or Knoppix “for dummies” book with a Knoppix live bootable CD in it, and a burned disc of a more up to date version. He knew I was into tech, and this was pre-Steam days. Internet then was not what it is now, so it was a seriously nice gift for a growing nerdling.

He’s slightly more present now that I’m an adult, and he swears he has no memory of this. Or of Knoppix. But he daily drove Ubuntu as of a few years ago, and he’s the only family member even remotely techy and old enough for it to have been.

Maybe I was blessed by Tux himself?

Might have also been one of my Dad’s coworkers, as he got one of them to backlight mod my GBA back before the SP came out. But it would be very weird if I confused an actual visit. Maybe there was no visit and my dad just handed me the stuff and told me who it was from?

It’s a bit of a mystery, with significant impact to my life trajectory.

Puppy linux is wonderful as part of an IT “USB toolkit” for when it might not be safe to boot the normal OS, if you need to try data recovery on a dying HDD, or just need quick access to linux based tools.

And it’s surprisingly full featured for the small size. I’ve lived out of it for a week or so when a HDD died and I was waiting for a new one to ship.

I’m still not sure if I would recommend it 😂

sounds like a NixOS user to me! I’ve been using NixOS as my daily driver for the past several months and I’m not sure if I would recommend it. It makes the hard things easy and the easy things hard. I love the fact that I can very easily pass kernel params or gpu settings via my flake. that’s nice. that’s easy. I don’t like finding some random FOSS project I want to try out and then trying to determine what dependencies I need, if I have them all in my nix-shell, etc.

But honestly once you figure it out and set up distrobox on it you’ll never need to distrohop again because you’ll have everything on one OS.

NixOS is fun once it clicks for you. It’s nice having a system you can run your way, configured your way, and there’s really no wrong way. I mean hell you can have your configuration in javascript if you REALLY wanted to. you can have everything in a single configuration file if you prefer that or you can have things in individual modules and managed via a flake.nix. You can have all your various configurations for your DEs/WMs/etc in the .config dir or you can put them all in a single file or you can have NixOS manage the individual configs for you for easy backup.

I like that it’s extremely easy to reproduce the system and back it up. my system is backed up to a private git repo and if I need to rebuild my system on another PC it’s just a matter of installing NixOS and then cloning my system repo and then I’m on the exact same setup as another machine. Also because of this and with nix-shells it makes dev work a breeze. same exact setup every time so the old argument of “well it works on my machine” doesn’t apply.

All that being said I’m not sure if I’d recommend it to others. It makes the hard things easy and the easy things hard. But it’s one of those distros where you’ll switch from it for like a week or two and then miss it and want to go back. but keep in mind those weekly/bi-weekly switches are common. sometimes you’ll just feel like you’re spending way too much time configuring your nixos system so you’ll switch to like Fedora or something so you don’t have to think about it. Or you get frustrated trying to get something to work on NixOS so you’ll switch to Arch where everything just works. but then you’ll get bored of those distros and go back to NixOS.

It’s a never ending cycle. Thankfully NixOS takes all of 10-15min to reinstall and back to the previous setup.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card and LNX-BBC or the more recent damn small Linux

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Star_OS

the Mandriva family (OpenMandriva, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, ROSA, ALT Linux)

Originally based on Red Hat Linux and the forks are obviously not built from the ground up either.

In fact, any fork of anything is just outright against the premise of OP.

Aren’t both Alpine and NixOS really big in certain enterprise areas? And NixOS and Alpine are both relatively well covered in news articles and posts.

When I think niche Linux distro, something more like GoboLinux comes to mind:

>GoboLinux at a Glance - GoboLinux is a modular Linux distribution: it organizes the programs in your system in a new, logical way. Instead of having parts of a program thrown at /usr/bin, other parts at /etc and yet more parts thrown at /usr/share/something/or/another, each program gets its own directory tree, keeping them all neatly separated and allowing you to see everything that’s installed in the system and which files belong to which programs in a simple and obvious way.

Fun to see Chimera mentioned. The company I work for is actively helping fund its development.

No release in several years, forums have a bunch of spam posts in there, etc. Seems to be mostly untouched at this point, so probably dead yeah.

I believe it is technically based on Fedora, but it’s not really clear to what extent (i.e. is it a fork from 20 years ago or do they keep it in sync?), but Red Star OS is a distro for which an exception can be made.

Red Star OS 1.0 https://media.piefed.social/posts/4M/Pj/4MPjW2RXKMWSSNC.png

Red Star OS 2.0: https://media.piefed.social/posts/2Z/hb/2Zhb2FCzj5a9Pop.png

https://media.piefed.social/posts/i4/aq/i4aq8eEt7di3h34.png

Red Star OS 3.0: https://media.piefed.social/posts/WG/eX/WGeXquRsBaUIxFe.png

Red Star OS 4.0: https://media.piefed.social/posts/Hf/4o/Hf4o1AwKpoHuFjU.jpg

Beyond the rather interesting design/visual choices, it has some rather unique features and functionality.

This is what Torvalds himself recommends to all real Linux fans

How is Solus these days? It was my daily driver a few years ago and I loved how simple and performant it was, but I moved away from it after the second time project leadership crashed out and had to be replaced.

I always liked Budgie, but never ran Solid.

I tried more “niche from a popular perspective”. You’re right, especially alpine is in the background of a lot of docker containers but rarely an end user who just want their desktop environment knows them.

For nixos I’ve not yet seen anyone in the enterprise world pushing for it - there it’s still all about containerization and orchestration in cloud environments, using that as reproducibility layer. That might change though with data sovereignty discussions going on.

Very performant and reliable. They stick to a weekly sync on Fridays where regular updates are pushed out, fixes for high impact bugs and CVE:s arrive when needed.

The org is quite a bit larger these days with several core people sharing responsibilities.

https://getsol.us/about/team/

oh does yocto count? it’s more of a compiler that produces a linux, though.

SUSE, Yggdrasil, Softlanding Linux Systems (SLS)

This reminds me of Coyote Linux a firewall distribution that I used to run on a 386 from a floppy disk.

Buildroot and Alpine

You should be able to run any Linux

Wow new macos version looks bad SMH.

/S

Alpine is less obscure now because of containers, but I haven’t considered running it as a desktop OS.

Yeah, but Gallium has optimizations and drivers for Chromebook-specific hardware, including a custom kernel.

With any other distro, performance and battery life won’t be quite as good, and some of the Chromebook specific stuff like special keyboard keys and the touchpad might not work.

Isn’t that stuff mainlined?

I wouldn’t personally use it on the desktop. If it ran systemd I’d consider it for servers.

Technically not a distro, but ELKS linux can run on 128kb ram in rom-based computers.

puppy isn’t independent, its based on other distros like ubuntu/debian or void

yeah but it’s a different one every release, whatever makes the smallest image.

Not that I’m aware of.

Gobo Linux is interesting. It changes the way the disk is layed out

why? what does it do to faint hearts?

It also came with a book on how to use Linux, and part of it was a manga. I think you can still find it here and there.

Openwrt is fairly secure, no? Otherwise people wouldn’t use it in their network stack?

Generally it is pretty solid. By obscure I mean distros like Tinycore that don’t have security as a focus

Makes them read Scheme.

But seriously, it’s a scheme-based approach to a fully free declarative OS, similar to NixOS (from which it was forked ages ago. They are doing very interesting work and some HPC and scientific folks are taking notice.

SliTaz GNU/Linux is a cool lightweight diatro.

Haven’t used it in a while. It was dead for a bit, but it’s active again. I should look at what it feels like these days. I remember being impressed at how smoothly it ran while looking good, +10 years ago, in 300MB or so.

Sculpt OS. It isn’t linux but I feel like it deserves a mention.

source mage linux.

Igalia?

it was inpired and afaik at first based on it, but arch has threaded its own path ever since

Nah. A company looking to run FreeBSD user space software like pf on Linux.