We all know about Debian, Fedora and Arch but what about the lesser known ones that are built from the ground up?
You must log in or # to comment.
puppy linux! an entire live graphical desktop system with browser and office suite compressed to fit in 300MB, so you can run it from RAM and use the USB for storage.
puppy isn’t independent, its based on other distros like ubuntu/debian or void
yeah but it’s a different one every release, whatever makes the smallest image.
I’m going to say Alpine/postmarketos. The reason I say both is pmos uses Alpine as a base, but a lot of the code is built from the ground up as its a linux distro designed to run on mostly ARM devices (old phones and tablets. Even some old iOS devices!)
I’ve got a really obscure one.
Anyone here heard about FLI4L? Floppy ISDN for Linux? Built from the ground up to be usable on your really old PC as a router. Originally it fit on a single floppy disc and was able to turn a 386 into a modem or ISDN router. Later they added the ability to route between LANs and DSL.
By now the requirements have been raised to super beefy 586 PCs. It probably doesn’t fit on a floppy disc anymore.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card and LNX-BBC or the more recent damn small Linux
This reminds me of Coyote Linux, a firewall distribution that I also used to run on a 386 from a floppy disk!
Solus is build from scratch.
How is Solus these days? It was my daily driver a few years ago and I loved how simple and performant it was, but I moved away from it after the second time project leadership crashed out and had to be replaced.
Very performant and reliable. They stick to a weekly sync on Fridays where regular updates are pushed out, fixes for CVE:s can be pushed out inbetween.
The org is quite a bit larger these days with several core people sharing responsibilities.
I always liked Budgie, but never ran Solus.
Bedrock Linux is a meta Linux distribution which mixes-and-matches components from other distributions and integrates them into one largely cohesive system.
…
Traditional Linux distributions distribute software which includes the Linux kernel. This is done with the aim of providing users a Linux based operating system.
Meta Linux distributions share the eventual goal of a Linux based operating system, but do so in a means other than distributing the end-goal software itself.
Other meta Linux distributions include:
- Linux From Scratch which provides a set of instructions to build a Linux system.
- Gentoo Linux which provides a flexible system which can compile the user’s desired Linux system. Gentoo describes itself as a metadistribution.
Bedrock provides a means to compose a target of the user’s desired system from a potentially eclectic mix of parts of other distros.
GNU Guix System is independent I think. Interesting distro, but not for the faint of heart.
why? what does it do to faint hearts?
Makes them read Scheme.
But seriously, it’s a scheme-based approach to a fully free declarative OS, similar to NixOS (from which it was forked ages ago. They are doing very interesting work and some HPC and scientific folks are taking notice.
I’m running Gallium OS on an old Chromebook … it’s a dead distro at this point, and getting a bit frightfully outdated, but it’s the only distro specifically made for that hardware.
You should be able to run any Linux
Yeah, but Gallium has optimizations and drivers for Chromebook-specific hardware, including a custom kernel.
With any other distro, performance and battery life won’t be quite as good, and some of the Chromebook specific stuff like special keyboard keys and the touchpad might not work.
Isn’t that stuff mainlined?
Not that I’m aware of.
NixOS is fun once it clicks for you. It’s nice having a system you can run your way, configured your way, and there’s really no wrong way. I mean hell you can have your configuration in javascript if you REALLY wanted to. you can have everything in a single configuration file if you prefer that or you can have things in individual modules and managed via a flake.nix. You can have all your various configurations for your DEs/WMs/etc in the .config dir or you can put them all in a single file or you can have NixOS manage the individual configs for you for easy backup.
I like that it’s extremely easy to reproduce the system and back it up. my system is backed up to a private git repo and if I need to rebuild my system on another PC it’s just a matter of installing NixOS and then cloning my system repo and then I’m on the exact same setup as another machine. Also because of this and with nix-shells it makes dev work a breeze. same exact setup every time so the old argument of “well it works on my machine” doesn’t apply.
All that being said I’m not sure if I’d recommend it to others. It makes the hard things easy and the easy things hard. But it’s one of those distros where you’ll switch from it for like a week or two and then miss it and want to go back. but keep in mind those weekly/bi-weekly switches are common. sometimes you’ll just feel like you’re spending way too much time configuring your nixos system so you’ll switch to like Fedora or something so you don’t have to think about it. Or you get frustrated trying to get something to work on NixOS so you’ll switch to Arch where everything just works. but then you’ll get bored of those distros and go back to NixOS.
It’s a never ending cycle. Thankfully NixOS takes all of 10-15min to reinstall and back to the previous setup.
Slackware, Gentoo, the Mandriva family (OpenMandriva, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, ROSA, ALT Linux), Void, Alpine, Chimera, Venom, CRUX, Exherbo, Paldo, the PiSi family (PiSi Linux, old versions of Pardus), and Solus (eopkg is a fork of PiSi).
the Mandriva family (OpenMandriva, Mageia, PCLinuxOS, ROSA, ALT Linux)
Originally based on Red Hat Linux and the forks are obviously not built from the ground up either.
In fact, any fork of anything is just outright against the premise of OP.
Buildroot, Alpine and OpenWRT
Just a word of warning: be careful of some of the more obscure distros as they tend to get behind on security updates
Alpine is less obscure now because of containers, but I haven’t considered running it as a desktop OS.
I wouldn’t personally use it on the desktop. If it ran systemd I’d consider it for servers.
Openwrt is fairly secure, no? Otherwise people wouldn’t use it in their network stack?
Generally it is pretty solid. By obscure I mean distros like Tinycore that don’t have security as a focus
oh does yocto count? it’s more of a compiler that produces a linux, though.
slackware, gentoo, crux maybe
there are stuff like tinycore too
I think arch is based on crux?
Or smth Idkit was inpired and afaik at first based on it, but arch has threaded its own path ever since
I see
Trisquel GNU/Linux is a libre distro with zero proprietary software and zero obfuscated binary-blobs used in drivers.
So the entire codebase of your distro is visible and readable.
Based on Ubuntu, so it gets the best of Debian and Ubuntu, and then strips out the non-free cruft and possible exploits.
Based on Ubuntu
So not fitting the “built from the ground up” criteria asked by OP.
Did not parse that bit.
LFS, then. By definition, ‘from scratch’.
Technically not a distro, but ELKS linux can run on 128kb ram in rom-based computers.
SliTaz GNU/Linux is a cool lightweight diatro.
Haven’t used it in a while. It was dead for a bit, but it’s active again. I should look at what it feels like these days. I remember being impressed at how smoothly it ran while looking good, +10 years ago, in 300MB or so.
