I shouldn't talk because I dip in and out, but I do that because I like the possibilities. Like, what if someone comes up with a concept, but no one tries it, and it turns out to really work? Like, I like immutability as a concept, so I've tried Silverblue, Kinoite, and Bazzite. If nobody gave it a go, then the concept would die on the vine.

Also, I like seeing different ways of thinking about technology.

void boots fast on rather old or very low powered copmuters :3

I really like immutable distros, and am currently using NixOS. I feel like despite still being relatively obscure, NixOS is a bit of an outlier since it has more packages than any other distro and is (so far) the only distro I've used that has never broken. There is a steep learning curve, and I certainly wouldn't recommend it for non programmers, but it is something truly different than all mainstream Linux distros while being extremely reliable.

I'm using RebeccaBlackOS because it finally utilizes Wayland's capabilities fully.

Just saying, I've never had a virus with Temple OS.

I daily drive Slackware.
What drove me to it was curiosity. "How the fuck does a distro without dependency resolution even work? And why are people still using it?" As it turns out, it's working very well actually. And I am now one of those people.
I like to tinker and solve puzzles. Installing the most old-fashioned distro on a modern convertible laptop, then bashing it till it looks and feels modern was a fun puzzle.
And it turned out to be a system I can daily drive on any device. Cause contrary to popular belief, you don't need to hunt down dependencies manually every time you install something, that would be dumb. Once it's set up, it's actually very low maintenance and the knowledge I gained about its quirks will likely still be applicable in 10 years.

Because I'm a software luddite that believe we peaked in design at BSD/Plan9, and most of the "innovations" of enshittified corporate mainstream distros (redhat userland, atomic/immutable environments, "universal" (unless you're not on linux) package management, containerization of anything and everything) don't impress me, and more often than not turn me away. I'm not saying software can't improve, but when it comes to mainstream linux (especially redhat), innovation is always 0 steps forward 40 convoluted leaps back with bonus windows compatibility.

reliant on upstream sources

Not relevant to independent distributions, which I'd actually consider more of a problem with popular distros very often being forks (most often of debian).

I daily drive secureblue; or, to be more precise, its bluefin-main-userns-hardened image.

"Why?", you ask. Because security is my number one priority.

I dismiss other often mentioned hardened systems for the following reasons:

• Qubes OS; my laptop doesn't satisfy its hardware requirements. Otherwise, this would have been my daily driver.
• Kicksecure; primary reason would be how it's dependent on backports for security updates.
• Tails; while excellent for protection against forensics, its security model is far from impressive otherwise. It's not really meant as a daily driver for general use anyways.
• Spectrum OS; heavily inspired by Qubes OS and NixOS, which is a big W. Unfortunately, it's not ready yet.

I use guix because, while it has a small community, the packaging language is one of the easiest I've ever used.

Every distro I've tried I've always run into having to wait on packages or support from someone else. The package transformation scheme like what nixos has is great but Nixlang sucks ass. Being able to do all that in lisp is much preferred.

Plus I like shepherd much more than any of the other process 0's

I Use Cachyos Its because it has alot of gaming tweaks and optimizations and because installing regular arch is quite painful (yeah its a arch based distro)

I use Nobara on my gaming PC just because it has some gaming tweaks by default but is otherwise just stock Fedora so any issues can be searched as if I was on Fedora.

Linux culture is about freedom of choice and movement. Any project can be forked, tweaked, expanded, or outright overhauled by anybody with the know-how in order to meet specific use cases. And those use cases are often the same as other's use cases. But in most cases, they are still rooted in the project they forked from. I.E, any guide that applies to Ubuntu is likely going to apply to Pop!_OS or Mint, since they're based on Ubuntu. So there's rarely a downside to niche distros, because you can have something that's close enough to a popular distro but that caters to your unique needs and wants.

For me, for example, I use Nobara. It's rather niche and in most cases, it either works beautifully for you, or it doesn't work at all, honestly. But it's based on Fedora, so any guide for Fedora is likely to apply to Nobara. I get all the benefits of being on Fedora with tweaks and patches that make my gaming experience much more stable. And quite frankly, Nobara has made my rig run the best it ever has.

I use Linux since 1999 and I'm with you, I don't like niche distros. I like them to be well supported with many devs in them, and a structure around them. My days of tinkering died already in 2002 (I'm looking at you Gentoo and sia). Since then, I want things to work the way I expect them. That's why I now use Debian or Mint.

Generally, those people are experienced users that know exactly what they want out of a distro and don't really need help for anything. Those distros usually do a few things that the user is seeking.

For example, for some people, typing their thesis in LaTeX using emacs is the better workflow. To any average person that sounds insane when Microsoft Word is so easy to use and does the job just fine. But they enjoy it, it works for them, paper gets written, everyone is happy.

Distributions are a spectrum between novice users and expert users. Some people want to put the USB in and be good to go. Some people want a very precise setup for very specific needs.

You may ask, why not start with Ubuntu/Mint/Pop and remove what you don't like? Well, it's much easier to start with a blank slate than making one by chopping everything out. For my particular use case, I moved to Arch in big part because I got tired of the mainstream distros getting in my way, and wanted to start the other way around and only install and configure what I want, the way I want it. So Arch for me.

I know experienced users that really don't care about messing around and are happy with how it runs out of the box and are happy with the development environment provided by something like Ubuntu/Fedora.

And then there's my box which is a NAS, a workstation, a media PC for the TV, a build server, and a few other things, and it's all dynamically reassignable. Friend can pick up the controller in the TV room and a GPU gets assigned to it and starts up Steam in Deck mode on the TV, while I can still do my stuff and game on the workstation side for local multiplayer. If the game needs a server, no worries, it's a kube node, I can temporarily transfer the server locally and back on one of my real servers. Guest needs a PC? Sure, take this monitor and this keyboard, here's an ephemeral Windows install. Sure, I could probably twist Ubuntu into doing all that, but it's one hell of a lot easier starting from scratch.

I wouldn't say it's a full on daily, but Bunsenlabs distros. It started out with Lithium because they had a non PAE build and I needed it for an old Pentium M laptop. I ended up really liking it. It's debian at the end of the day so software support is plentiful. It's super lightweight. It ran on the pentium m laptop (only 1 gb of ram) without much issue. It's also baby's first foray into window managers as it used openbox.

I ended up installing it on my other old laptop that has an 8th gen i7. I've been pretty happy with it as a result.

I.have 2 gripes but idk if it's Bunsenlabs's fault. I had an nvme ssd that refused to play ball with it, a Samsung PM991A nvme ssd. I couldnt work with it at all. Using gparted to format it was a no go as Gparted would just die. I know that line of ssds is problematic in the hackintosh community. Not surprised that it sucks here. Also trying to disable the lid close is impossible. Tried cli, can't find my lid close sensor. It might be because it's a x360 laptop so it's a lot more complex lid detection wise.

Not sure if niche, but I use Arco Linux instead of the alternatives like Endeavour,, Manjaro, or plain arch.

Why? Its easier to setup than straight Arch. Manjaro was all over the place when I tried it a few years back. Arco, right from the ISO stage, let's you configure exactly what you want, with a handy guide on their website.

But the thing that keeps me loyal is the excellent community. The maintainer himself responds to most of your queries on telegram / discord (not FOSS reeee) and he's very active on YouTube as well with no nonsense guides and walkthroughs. Shoutout Eric Dubois

These days, it is totally feasible to have the best of both worlds with a niche distro that is exactly what you want and Distrobox with another distro to easily bring in any software that you miss. Distrobox totally solves the compatibility problem.

For example, you could have a MUSL based distro like Alpine or Chimera Linux as your host OS. Need software that does not run on MUSL? Just install a stripped down Debian image on Distrobox and “apt install” whatever you like.

A few weekends ago ( just for fun ), I installed Red Hat 5.2. Not RHEL 5, real Red Hat 5.2 from before the Fedora days. My idea was to build Podman and Distrobox on it so that I could get access to the current Arch Linux repos ( and AUR ). I got a bit lost in dependency hell and did not quite get there but I was close. I might try again sometime.

Gentoo linux, the main reason is ive tried many distros, which to alot of there credit worked pretty well for 99% of stuff. But like for example bazzite somthing broke upstream to where because of how OCI works and it layers systems. It takes Silverblue and adds alot of packages to become Bazzite and then my repo stripped out stuff i didnt want. But it became A NIGHTMARE when your builds fail and you cant figure out why. And its because of somthing upstream. And you cannot build/update because upstream brokey. And like with NixOS which i still daily on my main rig, but gentoo on everything else. Is really powerful but the immutability gets in your way for some things and it takes alot of time to adapt scripts or troubleshoot. So i ended up installing gentoo on my other computers because they do simple tasks, i dont half to worry about breakage because of snapper and stable channel (at least on the NAS) And its alot of fun to turn a live CD into a OS that has only what you want in it. SystemD or OpenRC, hardened toolchains or normal? And distcc and binhost are S tier

Why? Why not?

Currently running Debian Stable, but in the process of switching over to Alpine (yes, Alpine on the desktop). The lightweight, stripped-down feel calls to me and I like the little BSD-isms thrown in. musl might present problems down the road, but a lot can be bypassed by using flatpaks. Also using the change as incentive to try out Wayland and LabWC (bringing back that Openbox goodness). Kinda enjoying the process of piecing stuff together rather than trying to pare it down afterwards.

I don't get "distros"

I can customize my system to my liking. There some popular bases but that is it

I too prefer big distros, but niche distros are usually big distros with small tweaks in the default config or installed packages. It's Debian/Fedora/Arch slightly tweaked.

It's like Linux From Scratch... with friends. Every distro has a purpose. I haven't done super niche. One day I'll probably try to run Gentoo much more seriously, and maybe an LFS just to see if I can.

Linux is the realm of all computer science students when it comes time to learn about operating systems, processes, threading, interrupts, schedulers, memory, etc. All levels exist in this space. The major distros all have underlying reasons they exist too. It is not branding/marketing like much of the consumer world.

Debian for ages, now Gentoo, Slackware and occasionally Devuan. Not really niche i'd say...

Because i like choice and flexibility.

I'm using Dietpi on my Orange pi zero 3. Aaaaaand because I'm (pretty much) forced to.