Longene Linux. Linux-based operating system kernel intended to be binary compatible with application software and device drivers made for Microsoft Windows and Linux.
dyne:bolic - specifically 1.4.1
Had support for the original Xbox, a multimedia editing / streaming focussed OS. I’d never run it on mine - just messed with xdsl before going back to XBMC.
postmarketOS. Way too underrated.
Thank you 🤗 I hope not too many people see us as obscure though…
Meego, a combination of Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo. It only ever shipped on one device, the Nokia N9.
I much enjoyed it back in the day. Nokia even had their own app store for it and gave a nice financial incentive for the first hundred or thousand apps.
I feel Jolla & SailfishOS is the spiritual successor.
Yes, particularly the variant distributed on a business-card sized CD rom. To be carried in your wallet for emergency use.
Oh jeez. I forgot about that. I had that running on my DS back in the day from a GBA flashcart with a big-ass CompactFlash card sticking out the bottom. Good times.
Wow, I just realized it was the first Linux I ever used
hyperbola
they have a wiki with insane nonsens about why they don’t package certain things. Example:
pam
Package has different security-issues and is not oriented on the way of technical emancipation as Hyperbola is trying to adapt lightweight implementations.https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en%3Aphilosophy%3Aincompatible_packages
Wait… they’re militant enough about Free Software to refuse to package anything even slightly non-Free, but their “final goal” is to switch the kernel to BSD? WTF?
Wow, you weren’t kidding.
Why did I read all of this.
was that translated into english from another language?
I love how they blended FAQ with meth-induced psychosis rambling.
I’ve gotta give them kudos for sticking to their very strict values, but holy hell is this hard to parse
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
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.
Have you ever heard of arch? That’s what I use by the way
Hardly obscure.
Jarro Negro. Made by Mexican students. And as far as I know, it’s independent, not based on another distro.
elive
you think a distribution that automatically includes all the proprietary stuff that we use baked into the distro would be more popular since it makes linux ready to go for most people; but it still gets fewer than 300 clicks per month.
automatically includes all the proprietary stuff
Jail.
They’ve been able to figure it out so far
I feel like the Enlightenment desktop environment isn’t to everyone’s taste. It’s definitely got some idiosyncratic design choices…
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.
KISS
it’s just a single bash script and a repository containing package definitions to compile them from source.
Basically LFS on drugs.
Interesting, was searching for anybody who mentioned LFS/Linux From Scratch leading here. Doesn’t seem active anymore though.
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. : (
I never used Caldera Linux but I did use their DOS for a while.
