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Niche Distro Users: Why?

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?

0x0 ,

Debian for ages, now Gentoo, Slackware and occasionally Devuan. Not really niche i’d say…

Because i like choice and flexibility.

GustavoM ,
@GustavoM@lemmy.world avatar

I’m using Dietpi on my Orange pi zero 3. Aaaaaand because I’m (pretty much) forced to.

smeeps ,

I use Nobara on my gaming PC just because it has some gaming tweaks by default but is otherwise just stock Fedora so any issues can be searched as if I was on Fedora.

Mwa ,
@Mwa@thelemmy.club avatar

I Use Cachyos Its because it has alot of gaming tweaks and optimizations and because installing regular arch is quite hard (yeah its a arch based distro) i used regular fedora and its a pain to install stuff without rpm fusion

LeFantome ,

These days, it is totally feasible to have the best of both worlds with a niche distro that is exactly what you want and Distrobox with another distro to easily bring in any software that you miss. Distrobox totally solves the compatibility problem.

For example, you could have a MUSL based distro like Alpine or Chimera Linux as your host OS. Need software that does not run on MUSL? Just install a stripped down Debian image on Distrobox and “apt install” whatever you like.

A few weekends ago ( just for fun ), I installed Red Hat 5.2. Not RHEL 5, real Red Hat 5.2 from before the Fedora days. My idea was to build Podman and Distrobox on it so that I could get access to the current Arch Linux repos ( and AUR ). I got a bit lost in dependency hell and did not quite get there but I was close. I might try again sometime.

erwan ,

I too prefer big distros, but niche distros are usually big distros with small tweaks in the default config or installed packages. It’s Debian/Fedora/Arch slightly tweaked.

DaedalousIlios ,
@DaedalousIlios@pawb.social avatar

Linux culture is about freedom of choice and movement. Any project can be forked, tweaked, expanded, or outright overhauled by anybody with the know-how in order to meet specific use cases. And those use cases are often the same as other’s use cases. But in most cases, they are still rooted in the project they forked from. I.E, any guide that applies to Ubuntu is likely going to apply to Pop!_OS or Mint, since they’re based on Ubuntu. So there’s rarely a downside to niche distros, because you can have something that’s close enough to a popular distro but that caters to your unique needs and wants.

For me, for example, I use Nobara. It’s rather niche and in most cases, it either works beautifully for you, or it doesn’t work at all, honestly. But it’s based on Fedora, so any guide for Fedora is likely to apply to Nobara. I get all the benefits of being on Fedora with tweaks and patches that make my gaming experience much more stable. And quite frankly, Nobara has made my rig run the best it ever has.

superkret ,

I’m using RebeccaBlackOS because it finally utilizes Wayland’s capabilities fully.

https://feddit.org/pictrs/image/f8e8af68-f91f-44af-980b-c2ce9a7ae42a.jpeg https://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/rebeccablackos/screenshots/Screenshot_rbos_64bit_2024-05-06_21%3A00%3A53-4c28dbb4.png/max/max/1 https://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/rebeccablackos/screenshots/Screenshot_rbos_64bit_2024-01-26_21%3A27%3A09-a0e5dd88.png/max/max/1 https://a.fsdn.com/con/app/proj/rebeccablackos/screenshots/Screenshot_rbos_64bit_2024-01-27_19%3A05%3A05-fc75a18c.png/max/max/1

SuperSpecialNickname ,

Breathtaking!

Zozano ,
@Zozano@lemy.lol avatar

Finally, an OS to rival HannahMontannaOS

worldeater ,

I would totally run RebeccaBlackOS or HannahMontannaOS in a vm

superkret ,

The distros are very different. HM is just Ubuntu with a theme.
RB is, to my knowledge, the only distro built around Weston, Wayland’s reference compositor. It doesn’t include any Rebecca Black theming, it’s just called that cause the distro’s maintainer is a fan of hers.

worldeater ,

Ah ok, good to know

azimir ,

Way back in the day we’d download Britney Spears and My Little Pony™ distros. Times change, I guess.

ulkesh ,
@ulkesh@beehaw.org avatar

It’s Thursday…what the hell are you doing!!! You’re going to break the Internet!!!

Mispasted ,

Lmao got worse as I scrolled down.

But xwayland is impressive. I’ve been using i3 but might switch to sway. The xrandr --scale command makes things too fuzzy.

WalnutLum ,

I use guix because, while it has a small community, the packaging language is one of the easiest I’ve ever used.

Every distro I’ve tried I’ve always run into having to wait on packages or support from someone else. The package transformation scheme like what nixos has is great but Nixlang sucks ass. Being able to do all that in lisp is much preferred.

Plus I like shepherd much more than any of the other process 0’s

Crazazy ,

As a nix user, guix looks legit nice but it took me until 2 days ago to actually find community projects made for guix(https://whereis.みんな/) . Sometimes I just wish they used the same store and daemon as nix so that nix packages can work as guix dependencies and vice versa.

(Also major thing stopping me from using guix is I don’t get service types at all, let alone how you’d define your own service :( )

WalnutLum ,

You can use nix alongside guix, it’ll just double-up the dependencies on disk:


<span style="color:#323232;">services (append (list (service nix-service-type))
</span><span style="color:#323232;">                    %base-services)))
</span>

Services are, in guix terms, any configuration change to a computer, so creating your own service 99% of the time is just extending etc-service-type and creating a variable interface to fill in the config file text yourself

Creating a service as in a daemon of some kind uses shepherd and involves extending shepherd-service-type or home-shepherd-service-type with your service description, depending on whether the service runs in root or user space.

Shepherd service configurations aren’t actually part of the guix spec(www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/…/shepherd.html#Def…), but still use Guile, so you can interoperate them super easily.

It’s important in guix to understand lisp pretty thoroughly, and knowing how to program lisp is still a very useful skill to have so I’d recommend learning it even if you never touch guix.

Wolfram ,

I use Arkane Linux, which is based on Arch but is immutable. Every update is a new install. You can easily configure custom images to deploy for your specific wants or needs. It’s nice for keeping up to date with Arch while keeping how my machine is configured declared in an image. You can always roll back if something was wrong with the image you deployed too.

jpablo68 ,

Debian, I got tired of things breaking in arch and even in fedora. I learned a lot but in the end, I just got tired of it.

superkret ,

How is Debian a niche distro?

jpablo68 ,

oh, my bad I misunderstood the question 😅

possiblylinux127 ,

I don’t get “distros”

I can customize my system to my liking. There some popular bases but that is it

superkret ,

I used to think that, too. But even Ubuntu and Debian are very different operating systems now.
On the other hand, it’s all Linux under the hood, and almost all computing tasks can be done on almost any distro.

Finally, almost all distros exist because people choose to maintain them as a hobby without payment.
Who am I to judge whether they should pool their resources on fewer distros in their free time?
I drink and doomscroll in mine.

possiblylinux127 ,

A Debian base is different than a Ubuntu base.

That still doesn’t change much

dario ,

I have used Parabola GNU/Linux-libre exclusively on my main system for more than ten years. I like Arch Linux, but I do not like non free software.

mrmetaverse ,

Because Hyprland Arch is the Bees Knees

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