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
Yes, particularly the variant distributed on a business-card sized CD rom. To be carried in your wallet for emergency use.
Hannah Monata Linux and Red Star from North Korea.
Woah woah woah, there’s a North Korean Linux distribution?
A meme Linux is the “most obscure” you can think of?
Actually the Red Star developers seem very serious
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…
Its unpopularity may be related to that it asks money or a positive review in a blog to even try. Used to be so a few years ago.
i wasn’t aware that it had changed like that; i stopped using it when i switch to linux laptops from linux companies like tuxedo and system76
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?
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
Have you ever heard of arch? That’s what I use by the way
it’s main feature is that it completely redefines the system’s root directory structure. the only reason i even know it exists is because i’m friends with one of the creators
Gobo Linux has to have been the distro I was looking forward to most too. I really hope it picks up because it’s design philosophies. Absolutely phenomenal.
I hear you saying “not compatible with FHS” but then extra words I no longer need to hear.
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.
Rarely hear about DSL anymore, http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/
That was my go-to long ago
Suicide linux. Nobody can run it for more than a day
Edit: i just searched “suicide linux” to see if it still exists and one of the top results was ian murdock’s wiki page, :(
“suicide linux”
Looked it up with quotes and the first update in the first search result:
Update 2011-12-26
Someone has turned Suicide Linux into a genuine Debian package. Good show!
:(
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’m gonna go with Tom’s Root Boot. Or maybe the father of all live distros, Knoppix.
Didn’t think Knoppix was obscure, but that was my gateway to Linux first on all my personal PCs.
I guess the years have passed it by.
Jarro Negro. Made by Mexican students. And as far as I know, it’s independent, not based on another distro.
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
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 haven’t tried all that many distros, but I’d say Puppy Linux. Pretty neat that it loads into RAM from USB and has fairly light memory requirements, but it does feel a little on the clunky side as far as configuration and stuff goes.