Sell us on your favorite exotic/niche distro

Haha nice try. If everyone starts liking it then it won't be niche anymore. So I won't share it! /s

I think nixos is still niche, but seems to be gaining momentum. It has some unique features:

• Every package has its own dependencies, so you can install a 7 year old firefox alongside the latest, and have no interference.
• Packages with dependencies in common still share them (for space savings).
• Abandons the HFS, but can still fake it for apps that need it.
• Can make dev environments that are exactly reproducible across machines, and only exist within a specific shell session. So you can have a project that relies on an out of date version of a compiler, and another that uses the latest, and run both at the same time.
• Make your own packages that other people can install using a git repo address.
• The package language can also describe a machine's configuration; systemd services, default packages, user accounts, etc.
• You can build and remotely deploy a machine config in one line.
• You can cross compile a machine config for another cpu architecture, like ARM.
• OS upgrades are atomic, and reversible. If it doesn't work out, you can go back to the previous config.
• No reason to ever reinstall. Recently upgraded a machine that had sat in a closet for 5 years to the newest release. Flawless upgrade.
• Nixos boasts more packages than any other distro, over 100,000.

There are certainly downsides - poor docs, confusing core language. Instructions for installing something on say debian will not work on nixos. I do think this style of package management is the future, if perhaps not this specific implementation. It can be a pain but its also super solid.

Alpine. The Linux, not GNU/Linux joke aside, Alpine's kinda great. Light, fast, stable, great package manager. I've daily driven it on both a server and as my main distro and it's pretty nice for both... Unless you're on Nvidia.

I'm not sure if it's niche but openSUSE Tumbleweed isn't as popular as it deserves to be. If you are looking for more niche, back in my distro hopping days I enjoyed Kaos and Solus

Void is my favourite distro, although I haven't used it for a while. Extremely fast package manager, rolling release but not bleeding edge, super simple, very fun to tinker with (more than Arch imo). I stopped using it because I wanted something more popular for easier troubleshooting. But if I ever get a secondary PC/laptop I'll probably start using it again.

Not a distro but Qubes. Incredible security and privacy out of the box. Not for everyone but absolutely one of the most interesting developments in the OS world in the past decade or two.

Is Bazzite still niche?

Guix - It's basically an abstraction over software compilation and distribution. It uses guile lisp language as glue to bind it all together. (Full programming language to configure with)

The beauty arises if you want to get a minimal os running with a single application and package it either as a full iso or a docker container you can. Or if you need to get an OS to run as your router.

It's also highly encourages free software to the point, that proprietary software actually feels like huge downgrade to include. (Compilation from source is always available)

I've been using this only for 11 months. I've barely scratched the surface on what is possible. So I'm pretty sure I'm not making it justice on what a gem it is. For example: Only recently I started to use programs in an immutable way.

I like TailsOS, which is an amnesiac system that runs entirely in RAM and boots from a USB hard drive. The goal for the operating system is to be a safe operating system for people who are in compromising situations - from international reporters to survivors of domestic abuse, it is a way to highly reduce your ability to be tracked.

The downsides of amnesiac systems are obvious - without enabling the setting for permanent storage, effectively everything you do on the OS is lost every time. And if you do enable persistent memory, well, that's not exactly entirely safe if you are caught out.

What I like the OS for though is as someone who is not compromised or in a situation where I need these privacies (despite appreciating them), my usage of it makes it safer for others who are using it (since internet is through Tor), and I feel more comfortable using computers in the wild when needed, since I'm not logging in on the public operating system that will be used by everybody else.

Many people give these projects flack or diminish their values as a "daily driver", but I think often times forget the important aspects of them. They may not be a daily driver for you or I by nature of our needs, but they are certainly important daily drivers for others. In addition to that, supporting a project that helps people in compromised situations and becoming another node to bounce off of (again, Tor, not inherent to the usage of this OS) is a nice additional benefit.

Tl;DR amnesiac operating systems because they're simple, straightforward, and make you feel more like whitehat hackerman when you've done nothing at all.

Not niche, but surely exotic: NixOS, a distribution that is configured via a purely functional language. There is no such thing as installing or uninstalling packages, you add or remove things from your configuration and then simply apply that configuration.

https://www.crunchbangplusplus.org/

Crunchbang was one of the first Linux experiences I had and then found ++, I stopped using it recently to try out pop!os but the idea of crunchbang++ never leaves me. It was great on my little thin client laptop

May as well contribute my own 😜.

I'm an absolute sucker for exquisitely hardened distros. Hence, distros like Qubes OS and Kicksecure have rightfully caught my interest. However, the former's hardware requirements are too harsh on the devices I currently own. While the latter relies on backports for security updates; which I'm not a fan of. Thankfully, there is also secureblue.

Contrary to the others, secureblue is built on top of an 'immutable' and/or atomic base distro; namely Fedora Atomic. By which:

• It's protected against certain attacks.
• Enables it to benefit from more recent advancements and developments that benefit security without foregoing robustness.

If security is your top priority, Qubes OS is the gold standard. However, secureblue is a decent (albeit inferior) alternative if you prefer current and/or 'immutable'/atomic distros.

Not so much a niche distribution, but I would like to recommend Chimera Linux, because it combines musl with BSD userland.

Devuan - it's like debian, but without systemd.

hannah montana, nuff said!

CyclopOS I haven't use it but apparently it has its own Remote Desktop app on play store

TAILS for security

Rhino Linux! A rolling release Ubuntu distribution. It uses the Ubuntu devel repos + pacstall.

Three days and nobody mentioned TempleOS? If attempting to build The Third Temple in the form of an OS isn't niche and exotic, I don't know what is. 🤣

I have HoloISO running around on mini PCs because they just work as remote steam machines, can play games in their own right, and I can use them as media boxes if I want. I don't necessarily recommend it, but it was super easy to install and configure except for the Bluetooth issue that cropped up occasionally where I had to unload and reload the Bluetooth module. Now I just have a script that automatically does that on boot because I can't give a shit about fixing it.

I also have a couple of Slax USBs running around. They used to be relatively popular with folks who fixed computers. I like building from modules and I'm familiar with Slackware so it was a good fit for a live environment.

Is Alpine Linux obscure? Well, using it as a desktop is obscure, I guess. The decision to use musl libc is the main limiting factor for desktop usage, but thanks to the existence of runtime package managers like flatpak and/or static linking, you can run basically anything that requires glibc on Alpine these days (at the expense of extra disk usage for glibc libs).

If you don't know much about Alpine, it is an extremely lightweight Linux distro designed primarily for containers and virtualization, that ships with busybox and musl libc. It's basically the closest you can get to GNU/Linux without the GNU. The main appeal to me is the simplicity of the tooling and installation, it's the only Linux distribution I've used that gives me a similar vibe to OpenBSD. The defaults are almost perfect, but the first thing I would do when installing it is install the docs metapackage (otherwise you have no manpages), and optionally replace busybox with coreutils and friends (personally can't stand how non-posix compliant busybox is). I'd also replace the default busybox ash shell with a nice kornlike such as oksh, a clone of the OpenBSD shell.

Red Star OS!