Rarely hear about DSL anymore, http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
this post was submitted on 17 Nov 2024
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most obscure and to me coolest but unfortunately not very active https://sourcemage.org/
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2 days ago my friend found an old SATA hard drive and gave it to me to check what's on it, and me, not having a disk station or anything, and against all better judgment, I just swapped the disk in my laptop for my friend's, and instead of my laptop being fried it turned out the disk was running something called Crunchbang Linux
I loved that distro. Unfortunately it got discontinued at some point.
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I see no one has mentioned Bedrock Linux yet. Not sure though how others would rate its 'obscurity' though. It's definitely a standout among distros.
I'm gonna go with Tom's Root Boot. Or maybe the father of all live distros, Knoppix.
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Well I don’t hear much about Gentoo, Damn Small, Puppy or Knoppix anymore. Wonder if they still exist.
I haven’t done much disto hopping since I settled on Ubuntu around ‘08 and then on NixOS last year. I like my systems working when I need them and waiting around for a new install to finish is boring to me.
Gentoo still exists 🙂
Gentoo still exists. Damn Small was dead for a decade but has risen again recently. Puppy is alive and well. Knoppix is still alive, but the last downloadable release is almost 4 years old.
Gentoo's forums are quite active and it's one of my daily drivers. I think the others kinda faded away.
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No one mentioned Bunsenlabs or Crunchbang Linux here, but they aren't really that obscure.
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United Linux - the famous Red Hat Enterprise Linux killer!
I worked on that.
It was SuSe with any branding or tools ripped out, the carcass kicked over the fence for the rest of us to try to make an OS out of.
It had no chance. What we got was a bleeding corpse after SuSE had a sellable product to compete against us all with.
It killed turbo, it killed conectiva and it killed openlinux. Horrible thing.
The old PearOS(which looked like a meme-ish knockoff MacOS), UwUntu and Nyarch
I imagine there was a time when this wasn't obscure, but I'm guessing people today don't remember Caldera OpenLinux. That was the first Linux distro I installed/used. A guy from church gave his copy.
Caldera eventually became SCO. But I'm pretty sure I was using Caldera OpenLinux before the whole Novell patent suit thing.
Speaking of old, dead distros, my first Linux -- sort of -- was TurboLinux 6.0. I say "sort of" because I never successfully got it to install and run. : (
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Obscure as in "only for a very specific purpose and nothing else"?...
Well, there is the Mircrosoft linux distro for their azure cloud
I guess DD-WRT as distro for router is also kind of obscure. Or the more general openWRT for embedded systems.
SLiTaz
It's an obscure originally live usage oriented distro that you could also install. It was the first *Nix I ever used.
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