We all know about Debian, Fedora and Arch but what about the lesser known ones that are built from the ground up?
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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.
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.
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.
Chimera!! https://chimera-linux.org/
Check theleft and bottom of this tree too
SUSE, Yggdrasil, Softlanding Linux Systems (SLS)
Oasis, Derive, Kiss
source mage linux.
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.
Thanks for mentioning SliTaz. It made my shortlist too. Didn’t think anyone else would mention it. :)
SliTaz evokes a lot of love and joy. It’s like seeing a microbus… People just smile. Makes the world lighter.
Sculpt OS.
Although I’m not completely certain it is linux since it uses Genode which supports multiple kernels.
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.
Nobody even mentioned tinycore
Here are some independent distros I think need more respect/recognition:
- CRUX - It’s proper old school, been around for ages, still does things the old school ways, gets you perhaps more knowledge of your system than even archlinux, slackware, gentoo…
- KISS (and/or Carbs) - Similarly keeps you hands-on tight to your system.
- Exherbo - Takes commitment, to go from 0 to 10, users as developers. Godly, if you can.
- SliTaZ - Still as small as the old small DamnSmallLinux, and more pleasant (comparable to SLAX and Puppy).
- Gobo - Always needs honorary mention. Unique file system layout … ~ Would be cool if that were simply something we could toggle on any distro… Surely that’s just someone taking an afternoon with an LLM making XDG configurations… no? Okay, probably more complicated than I know. ~ But I digress…
- GuixSD - Manage your system with guile.
- PCLinuxOS - Convenient, catering to desktop users. Nice community spins. Oddly uses RPM package format, but with apt interface.
- BedrockLinux - What I’ve used for about 14 years as my daily driver. It’s cheating. ;) Linux’s best kept secret.
Big fan of each of these.
Also peripherally aware of…
- venom
- adelie
- milis
- side (uses PiSi package manager)
- ToaruOS (idk, just saw it for the first time now… showing there’s always more to explore…)
Bedrock Linux is a meta Linux distribution which mixes-and-matches components from other distributions and integrates them into one largely cohesive system.
…
Traditional Linux distributions distribute software which includes the Linux kernel. This is done with the aim of providing users a Linux based operating system.
Meta Linux distributions share the eventual goal of a Linux based operating system, but do so in a means other than distributing the end-goal software itself.
Other meta Linux distributions include:
- Linux From Scratch which provides a set of instructions to build a Linux system.
- Gentoo Linux which provides a flexible system which can compile the user’s desired Linux system. Gentoo describes itself as a metadistribution.
Bedrock provides a means to compose a target of the user’s desired system from a potentially eclectic mix of parts of other distros.
Gobo Linux is interesting. It changes the way the disk is layed out
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!)
It makes sense it would run on some old iOS devices. Iirc, they run heavily heavily customized alpine linux under the hood.
I remember jailbreaking my first-gen touch, and one of the first steps after you get root is to change the default creds from user: alpine pass: alpine, because there was a joke “malware” going around that relied on the default creds.
I believe the drivers for pmos are all written from scratch, at least for the iOS devices. I’m sure some things could be borrowed from Lineage device trees. Their Wiki says that most of their supported iOS devices dont have anything past basic screen support, so I would guess that the shared base is only marginally helpful, unless alpine is no longer a part of iPhones (iPhone 6 is the oldest on the supported list I think?)
Less popular distros that I use are NixOS and FreeBSD. I haven’t tried Gentoo yet, but I want to.
I want to buy a Framework laptop later this year. FreeBSD with KDE Plasma will be installed first, I might switch to Gentoo later, especially if work on the GNU Hurd kernel progresses far enough.
I haven’t tried Gentoo yet, but I want to.
Come. You want to. And it’s easy. Here’s a video install guide on how to install Gentoo, that’s not even 40 seconds long…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t09IbcxAJlU
;)
(… 24 days ago. Oh. Did you do it yet? On Gentoo yet? USE flag convertee now?)
I might switch to Gentoo later, especially if work on the GNU Hurd kernel progresses far enough.
I was briefly using Hurd with debian about 12 years ago… it didn’t hurt. Hurd didn’t hurt.
… I’ve been looking over at even more exotic kernels from time to time, yet to seriously dip my toe in… things like ironclad.
