Of those I’be personally tried, certainly chimera linux or mageia
If being usable is a metric, Slackware
Shark Linux
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 used to run Reborn OS at around 2017 for a few years. It used Cnchi installer, just like Antergos, and when Antergos died, I saw Reborn as its successor. But the title went to Endeavour (why?) and Reborn never got popularity.
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.
No one mentioned Bunsenlabs or Crunchbang Linux here, but they aren’t really that obscure.
Archbang maybe more?
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
BOSS.
SLiTaz
It’s an obscure originally live usage oriented distro that you could also install. It was the first *Nix 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.
hyperbola
they have a wiki with insane nonsens about why they don’t package certain things
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?
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!
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
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.
Wow, you weren’t kidding.
Why did I read all of this.
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.
Jarro Negro. Made by Mexican students. And as far as I know, it’s independent, not based on another distro.
