Not super obscure, but not many talk about it. Q4OS, I love it, a perfect windows replacement down to even imitating the old style windows installer. Plus it’s Debian based so it has a lot of support. I plan on moving my grandparents to it when windows 10 gets fully discontinued as their current rig doesn’t support 11
Longene Linux. Linux-based operating system kernel intended to be binary compatible with application software and device drivers made for Microsoft Windows and Linux.
Kiss linux. Gobolinux. They are both alien, but interesting, each one in its own way.
postmarketOS. Way too underrated.
Thank you 🤗 I hope not too many people see us as obscure though…
templeos /j
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.
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.
Rebecca Black OS.
It is the only Linux distro to date built around Weston, using Wayland’s full capability:
It doesn’t include any Rebecca Black theming or is related to her in any way.
It’s just called that cause the dev is a fan of hers.From the name, I expected a Hannah Montana Linux type distro.
Tell me if has a special “Friday” desktop at least.
I’m pretty sure that screenshot is Wayfire, not Weston.
right. This is Weston (same distro):
Yes, particularly the variant distributed on a business-card sized CD rom. To be carried in your wallet for emergency use.
Wow, I just realized it was the first Linux I ever used
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.
Bohdi linux. smoll and beautiful. Used to run it on my eeepc 701
That’s a blast from the past! I used to run #! On my 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.
Hannah Monata Linux and Red Star from North Korea.
Woah woah woah, there’s a North Korean Linux distribution?
Yes, of course. They can hardly use an OS that phones home to the US.
It’s interesting because it’s essentially the opposite of the idea behind Linux. Using Linux specifically to censor and spy on people is diabolical, but it makes sense why they chose it.
The idea behind Linux is to create an operating system anyone can use in any way they want.
That includes the North Korean government using it to spy on their people.Sounds more like a BSD kind of idea, to be honest. The GNU idea is to let specifically end-users have control over their own computer, not some third-party.
A meme Linux is the “most obscure” you can think of?
Actually the Red Star developers seem very serious
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:philosophy:incompatible_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 (i.e. away from copyleft)? WTF?
but their “final goal” is to switch the kernel to BSD (i.e. away from copyleft)?
HyperbolaBSD is a hard fork, that relicenses the OpenBSD kernel as GPL (as permitted by permissive licenses.) HyperbolaBSD has already dug into the OpenBSD source tree and discovered numerous licensing issues. https://git.hyperbola.info:50100/~team/documentation/todo.git/tree/openbsd_kernel-file-list-with-license-issues.md
HyperbolaBSD will be a truly libre distro that takes advantage of copyleft, while moving away from the major issues Linux is stepping into too.
Ah, that’s different then!
Hmm…
From https://wiki.hyperbola.info/doku.php?id=en:manual:contrib:hyperbolabsd_faq:
HyperbolaBSD is under a progressive migration by replacing all non GPL-compatible code. It will be replaced with new compatible code under Simplified BSD License. We do this in order to incorporate GPL code from other projects such as ReactOS, as well new code from scratch.
It’s not clear to me that relicensing the existing code to GPL is what they’re planning on doing; it sounds more like they’re going to mix in GPL code but not change the existing files to GPL en masse after they finish harmonizing them to two-clause BSD.
Frankly, IMO that’s too bad: I’d love to see them make the whole shebang GPLv3-or-later
Related question: is all Linux kernel code required to be licensed GPLv2-only, or are individual contributions allowed to be GPLv2-or-later? I’d be nice to see if that project (and stuff like HURD and ReactOS) could benefit from at least some Linux contributions, even if they can’t copy it wholesale.
afaik Linus is against GPLv3 in his Linux project https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaKIZ7gJlRU
It’s an ancient divide in parts of the FOSS community that believes copyleft licenses are not “free” because they force you to license contributions under the same license.
Yeah, I know, but I would’ve expected a distro that describes itself as “GNU/Linux-libre” would fall on the other side of it!
No one thinks this. Even permissively licensed BSD operating systems package GPL software and accept it as Free Software.
Wow, you weren’t kidding.
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
Why did I read all of this.
Certain things? Fucking luddite idiots don’t package 99.9% of software.
AIX Unix from the 1980s is literally more useful than that heap of garbage
Why so much rage?
Yes, Hyperbola is very ideological and super strict, but it was always meant to be that way - to provide a system that works in some way and at the same time is as ethical and “clean” as possible. Some people value it over anything, and for them, Hyperbola is a good pick.
Check out the random button on Distrowatch (distrowatch.com/random.php) - it’s like a Linux lottery, but you always win something weird!
This distro’s default background isn’t a knockoff of any particular popular non-*nix proprietary operating system’s default background:
Let’s make this a game. Click on it, then you have to install that on bare metal and daily it for a month.
Got RISC OS
mom, I’m scared
Oh god, I got Murena (LineageOS distro). How does one install that onto a ThinkPad T480…
What are you currently using?
On that ThinkPad, LMDE.
I got archcraft.
Lucky me. It’s also from India which is fun.
https://distrowatch.com/table-mobile.php?distribution=archcraft
I got portuex, never used Slackware but seems serviceable, I’m just scared of nVidia driver setup haha
Got PakOS, but since I’m not Pakistani I’m not sure how useful it would be
Ha I got tuxedo OS, hopefully thats not too niche
That’s what I’ve been running on my gaming machine and it’s been great.
That’s nice to hear!
I got Plamo Linux
Rockstor here. Which is interesting bc I’ve been thinking about setting up another NAS.
I got Linux Lite, which I’ve tried in the past.
Gentoo. Not that bad for a random pick.
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Smoothwall. I used to run it a lot back in the early 2000s for personal use and even helped set up a couple small businesses with it but I don’t hear of anyone else using it these days, people seem to love openwrt and pfsense more.
It was great for just taking any old x86 machine and making a powerful, fully featured firewall/router out of it, including a VPN server, all through a web interface. Nowadays that’s boring shit but in 2002 it was pretty cool.
Good old Smoothie. Served me well back then. I think it went commercial at some point.
We had this as the firewall in our school! I remember bypassing it in so many ways with Google DNS and whatnot.
Any reason to use this over opnsense?
The first one that came to mind was fli4l (Floppy ISDN for Linux). Originally a distro of German origin that fit on a single floppy disk to turn a 386 or 486 PC into a router for ISDN connections. Last I looked it’s still actively worked on.
There are probably tons of more obsuce ones. But this is one I actually used.
I’ve recently gone through my dad’s floppies and found one with fli4l.
