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.
I’m gonna go with Tom’s Root Boot. Or maybe the father of all live distros, Knoppix.
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.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
Check out the random button on Distrowatch (distrowatch.com/random.php) - it’s like a Linux lottery, but you always win something weird!
Let’s make this a game. Click on it, then you have to install that on bare metal and daily it for a month.
Windows 11
Jolicloud. I ran it on an old low-spec netbook in 2013ish, basically a ChromeOS before Chromebooks were a thing. It was discontinued in 2016 but great for the hardware while it lasted.
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!
:(
Take your pick from the Linux family tree
I don’t see nixos in there!
Should hyprland be in the table or are Wayland Compositors ignored? 👀
Well I don’t hear much about Gentoo, Damn Small, Puppy or Knoppix anymore. Wonder if they still exist.
I haven’t done much disto hopping since I settled on Ubuntu around ‘08 and then on NixOS last year. I like my systems working when I need them and waiting around for a new install to finish is boring to me.
I use puppy from time to time. Works well.
Gentoo still exists. Damn Small was dead for a decade but has risen again recently. Puppy is alive and well. Knoppix is still alive, but the last downloadable release is almost 4 years old.
Gentoo still exists 🙂
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.
I created a distro once for class that just had diaspora installed on a live CD. It was only used for demos a looong time ago. DiasporaTest.
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
Doesn’t Pop!OS do that already?
Yes, as far as they’re allowed to in this country
I feel like the Enlightenment desktop environment isn’t to everyone’s taste. It’s definitely got some idiosyncratic design choices…
First I’m hearing of it. I’ma try it out
It made me lazy since they got everything to work out of the box. Lol
This. People always go “It looks like MacOS” but to me esp the icons just look like outdated Linux Mint/Cinnamon from 15 years ago. If people like ot that’s cool, it’s just not for me.
Yellow Dog
I actually ran this on a PPC Mac back in the day
Someone gave me a PowerMac and of course I had to try to run Linux. It was an interesting experience, it would boot to MacOS and then run the Yellow Dog bootloader. Couldn’t get it to boot directly. That little experiment showed me how tightly Apple controlled what would run on Apple machines back then.
That was the my first distro. Getting it to run off a FireWire drive was an interesting introduction to Linux.
Fun fact: yum stands for Yellow dog Update Manager. I know it’s been replaced by dnf but I still think that’s cool.
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.
