Bohdi linux. smoll and beautiful. Used to run it on my eeepc 701
Bohdi is pretty nice. Needed a Linux test device at a job a few years ago and for some reason this was one of the only ones approved. Was pretty solid for the few times I needed to use it.
Meego, a combination of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo. It only ever shipped on one device, the Nokia N9.
Not really, at least in sites like gutefrage (german site where the biggest dumbasses of the world unite) There were a lot of questions about them trying to use it as their first Linux distro because they magically care about privacy
Maybe not some obscure ones, but here are some lesser known ones:
Talos Linux. It’s an immutable operating system designed specifically to deploy kubernetes.
OpenSuse Harvester Think Proxmox, but instead of VM’s and LXC containers, it’s VM’s and Kubernetes.
XCP-NG is a RHEL based distro designed for managing Linux virtual machines using the xen hypervisor, as opposed to KVM. Think Proxmox, but RHEL and Xen (also no LXC). However, it does not come with a web ui out of the box, you have to deploy it yourself. Technically, XCP is a Xen distribution, since Xen is a kernel with nothing but a hypervisor that runs under the main distro, but the primary management virtual machine is RHEL based, and uses Linux.
Speaking of Proxmox, Proxmox is technically a Linux distro.
SnowflakeOS is a project that aims to bring a GUI focused experience to NixOS.
TurnkeyLinux (site is loading very, very slowly for me right now) is not a single distribution, but rather a set of debian based distributions that are designed to be turnkey appliance virtual machines that contain and host a specific app. To deploy the app, all you have to do is set up the virtual machine.
Now, here are some not-linux, but interesting distros:
SmartOS. They ported KVM to unix, and also can use Linux syscall translation (similar to wine) to run apps in containers as well. There is also Bhyve. It’s a very interesting hypervisor platform.
OmniOS is similar. Bhyve, KVM, and Linux syscall translation in containers.
Microsoft Windows.
Not really a Linux distro, but TempleOS
There was a bunch of weird rebadged Ubuntu derivatives back in the day.
Ubuntu satanic edition. https://archiveos.org/ubuntu-satanic/
Ubuntu Christian edition. https://archiveos.org/ubuntu-christian/
Hannah Montana Linux https://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/
Sabayon Linux. I’m not sure if it’s still releasing updates, the main website is dead. It was based on Gentoo and later funtoo, but had a package manager of precompiled binaries. You could still use emerge if you wanted to. Definitely a weird and interesting distro
Blend OS is trying to do the declarative nixos thing but with an arch base. That’s pretty cool.
ClearOS was Intel’s attempt at an immutable os. From what I remember it was really fast.
Edit: actually it clear Linux not clearOS. Edit: also clear Linux is stateless. I don’t know, there’s a lot about it I don’t understand
Feren OS, a linux distro focused in customization. Started as a Linux Mint derivative, is now based on Ubuntu and/or Debian (I’m not really sure)
Everybody knows glorious leader’s operating system. 😉
There was this distro that stuffs everything of a package in one folder, instead of /usr/lib & co. What was it called again?
Gobolinux?
Right, thanks!
If being usable is a metric, Slackware
Hardly obscure.
How many ppl do you see rocking Slackware nowadays?
Still hardly obscure and usage metric is anything but precise. Slackware doesn’t have something like Debian’s popularity contest and distrowatch only meters page visits.
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 lived that distro. Unfortunately it got discontinued at some point.
Limiting to those I have used daily and treated as Linux (used the terminal for example) probably Maemo. I used to carry my Nokia Internet Tablet 770, and then my N800 everywhere with me.
Maemo is also an ancestor of both Tizen and Sailfish OS
My first smart phone was a Nokia N9. I loved Meego which was between Maemo and sailfish. I hatred Microsoft before that, but them killing Nokia made my hate burn even brighter.
