I use Ubuntu, which is apparently the least popular distro around.

I switched to NixOS almost two years ago, and it's really nice being able to define my whole system in a single set of config files. If my hard drive dies or I switch computers, I can just reinstall NixOS using my config files and everything will be set up the exact same way. It's extremely solid and I don't need to baby my system because if it breaks I can just reinstall everything back to normal.

And I can share parts of the config between devices, so when I change my Neovim or VSCodium configs using Home-Manager it gets synced to my other devices, as well as being saved as part of my NixOS config files.

voidlinux on my laptop (from Fedora) - why? I wanted to see what a systemd-less distro was like nowadays. I have used Linux since 1992 and Unix since 1984 so I'm used to SysVinit. What I find with voidlinux is a system I can understand easily - not that I struggle with systemd, but I felt there was just so much happening under the hood, just too clever by half. If I wanted MacOS, I'd have bought an Apple.

The packaging system on voidlinux is sooooo much faster than fedora. The really weird thing is that my battery life almost doubled. I can't explain it except to say that the laptop is much calmer than under fedora, which seems to run the fan constantly. Same workload, CPU governers, powertop tweaks etc etc - but battery life almost doubled.

The one downside is a smaller array of packages in the repositories. But since I'm happy installing from source for those few corner cases, it's no biggie.

I've left fedora on my media/file server for now as I still do some fedora packaging (mainly for sway related packages).

I don't know if openSUSE Tumbleweed counts as a less popular distro but it's certainly underrated. I chose it with a roll of the dice and stayed because it's bloody good.

I use Slackware, which is so unpopular it doesn't even show up in this thread, yet.
What made me choose it is the fact that it hardly ever changes, at all. It's a bit weird to set up at first, but all knowledge gained about it will stay relevant for a very long time. Also, it is a real general purpose distro, so I can use it on my gaming PC, laptop and server.

Debian would probably be a better choice when I just take practicability into account, but I like Slackware's philosophy, and running a system that forces me to learn it inside out. Arch is too bleeding edge for me.

Is Gentoo lacking enough popularity?

If so, I use it because it offers unrivalled flexibility, even compared to Arch, portage, which is an epic package manager, a dedicated security team, reasonably large community and developer base, source-based package distribution and fast package updates, which often outpace even arch.

I've been running crunchbang++ on an older laptop since they updated to the latest Debian release.

I love how simple and speedy it is and since it's based on Debian 12 and GTK 4 I can still run all my software super easily.

It's also become my go-to live distro.

Does Gentoo count?

It's not that unpopular. I chose it because it is very powerful. It really makes use of every Linux power there is. It makes solving problems yourself much easier, and customization is big.

NixOS for declarative system configuration.

I use Void Linux on my home servers and I really like it. Clean , small, and stable.

Fedora Silverblue

I use Fedora Silverblue, I don't know if that (still) counts as "underground"-distro.

Reason I switched: I've been distrohopping/ desktophopping for the whole time I used Linux (~2-3 years) and always came back to Fedora. I really like it's sane (for me) defaults.

Problem: I broke pretty much any system I installed after a few weeks.
Knowing enough to change everything, but doing exactly that without knowing exactly what I do and how to fix stuff is really bad.
Instead of fixing a problem, I just reinstalled. That took me just an hour everytime, but still is a bad practice, even when it's quicker.

Also, everytime I was happy with Gnome, KDE got a shiny new feature I just wanted to have, and I switched the Fedora spin, since switching DE on a used system feels really dirty and buggy.

The last time I broke my (Tumbleweed) install without actually doing anything I just said "Fuck it, even if I loose some freedom, I will now only use immutable systems from now on!".

I decided for Fedora, and oh boy...

Actually, I didn't loose much freedom or functionality at all!

(Only exception: no VPN app, I have to use the menu from Gnome; and somehow, Boxes doesn't work atm, maybe that's just a bug).

I'm now using it for 2 months and couldn't be happier!!! Why?

• Atomic updates + super quick and easy rollback support (already saved my butt) by rebooting and selecting another image.
• Clear separation between "my" stuff and the OS, which is really intuitive.
• Feels clean.
• I can rebase anytime I want (switch to KDE, a WM, and so on) with one command and no residual data or bugs.
• Self maintaining with automatic updates in the background.
• Unlimited software: not an advantage of SB, but you have to use distrobox sometimes, and I would never discovered that tool without!
• AND, a project called uBlue . You can create or download custom images, like a SteamOS/ Nobara-clone, Vanilla with QOL-changes, almost all DEs (e.g. XFCE, which is unsupported by default), and so on.

I'm really in love with Silverblue, everybody should check it out!

OpenMandriva. It is the official successor from Mandrake/Mandriva and has a rolling release edition called ROME which has brand new software. It is independent too and does not belong to a corporation.

We are looking for developers, packagers, translators, supporters. If you are interested come and join our Matrix chat :)

Another for crunchbang++ a really good minimal Debian distro with no desktop environment, just Openbox window manager. Have been using since it picked up from the original crunchbang. Have built my own kinda desktop environment how I like it and I will never change.

I use UWUntu

I'd be more interested in what obscure text editors, window managers, etc people were using regardless of distro. Distro in my mind is about software release and install philosophy, any distribution that comes with a lot of preinstalled software is generally built on the back of a more skeletal distribution, and is interesting mostly for what software choices it makes.

I just installed Linux two nights ago! I tried Mint but it wouldn't install because of RST being enabled. I didn't feel comfortable trying to disable it, I was afraid I'd break something. I installed OpenSuse Tumbleweed and it went smoothly! It's been fun being on linux. I customized the theme, downloaded some updates and got Steam working. My only issue is booting into it. I have to boot into windows, restart holding shift and then boot to USB SSD from there. My next goal is getting a boot screen that will allow me to pick Linux or Windows drive.

I've used alpine a lot on my laptop, though it's currently been relegated to my home server only. It's a great distro, if you can live with it's limitations. Stable, fast, compact and has a great package manage.

Alpine Linux. I started using it to dogfood my packages I was maintaining for postmarketOS but I've come to really like it. It does help that I can just fix packaging problems (or just missing packages entirely) myself.

Previously I used Gentoo which I still have a place in my heart for. If I'd ever move to anything else it would probably be Gentoo again.

Not sure if I will continue using Gentoo, but thats what I've been using for the past.

I was curious just to try to install it, but after I did it and learned about portage (package manager) and the USE flags and I really liked it beacause it gives you so much control. For example, dont want packages to have bluetooth because your motherboard doesn't support bluetooth? You can do it via USE flags per package or globally. Idk I just really like this.

But im hella busy rn in college so I might go back to arch or fedora.

Edit: Brain no worky meant to say for the past month.... mb

I've been a crux user for over 10 years now. I switched to it from Archlinux because it uses a port tree system for packages (think of it as the AUR but for everything) and because the package "recipes" are very simple and easy to write.

At the time I was packaging a lot of stuff on Arch and the PKGBUILD format felt too bulky, complex and constraining for my needs. I switch to crux and found one of the simplest distro out there, and sticked to it. It's also the Linux distro that feels the most like OpenBSD, which is neat as well.

Also the mascot.

I've been using Source Mage for about a year now! It's a source-based distro like Gentoo. It's magic themed, so instead of repositories we have grimoires, and instead of packages we have spells :) my main reason for using it is because I tried it out a few years ago and the magic themed intrigued me. Eventually I decided to write some of my own spells (some important programs were missing that I wanted) I found them a lot easier to parse than gentoos ebuilds personally. But after I'd been sending PRs for a few months, I got added to the team as an official maintainer!

it's a really fun distro to use, if not a bit hard to get up-and-running (only tarball-based install, we used to have ISOs but they're out of date for now) I've put a lot of work into getting it how i like it, i enjoy the tinkering aspect of it :) its fun

Bodhi Linux. I have an old System76 Starling netbook that stopped working after some updates left it in the dust. I think it had a netbook version of Ubuntu on it originally. Years later I installed Bodhi Linux on it (since it was supposed to be good for low spec machines) and I currently use it as an Angband terminal, a photo slideshow device, and occasionally surf the web with it just because I can :)

I'm amazed at how well it works with an Intel Atom processor, 2GB of ram, and a 250GB disk drive. Kudos to the Bodhi Linux team.

Does using Alpine for your desktop count? I don't do any server or container stuff, it works like any other distro and the packages are quite up-to-date so...

Fedora Kinoite. Some time in the future this will only be Fedora KDE though. The future of well structured, versioned and controlled Linux Distros. So easy to service, I would never want to maintain a fleet of PCs with anything else

I use Void Linux. I switched from Arch btw because I liked their package manager, was curious about their init system runit, and still wanted a rolling release. I've used it for a little over a year now and overall I've been happy.

CachyOS (arch-based) because I read somewhere it was good for gaming on recent rigs (supposedly pre-optimized stuff that I'll probably never learn about).

So far so good, it's been an almost "everything works out of the box" experience.

Had mainly used debian and arch before that.

Open Media Vault (OMV)! I was given a used QNAP NAS, but didn't want to use their OS. TrueNAS has higher system requirements than what I had and Unraid is paid. OMV has been a dream! Having the flexibility of a full Debian OS, but also with the prepackaged software I need, it amazing. Plus, I love the web UI. At the time of writing this, I have 12TB of usable space with 3 months of uninterrupted uptime.

Idk if this counts but I found my home in a less popular distro, kind of.

I'd tried a few back in the early '00s. While my friends were experimenting with drugs and shit, I was experimenting with Linux distros and virtual machines lmao.

I started with Suse. I'm not too sure what made me switch or where I heard about this one from, but I eventually moved on to Mepis. It was originally rooted in Debian, then moved to Ubuntu before being discontinued.

My good friend at the time was big into Debian. I felt like pure Debian was too much for me to take on as a noob, but I wanted to be able to reach out to him for help now and again when I needed it. Switching to Mepis was pretty much a no-brainer. It was easy enough to get accustomed with. I was still mostly a Windows user, so the transition to KDE was simple. I'm old enough to remember the days of DOS so bumping around a CLI was also not that big of a deal.

The hardest parts were understanding how to install software (the concept of the repository was new to me), and the basic terminal commands. From there I was mostly good.

I remember when Mepis moved to Ubuntu, there were a lot of groans - myself included. But ironically, I've been a pretty much dedicated to Ubuntu for my linux stuff for ages. These days I'm running it with i3wm and I have no major complaints.

To be completely honest, though, I still don't really fully understand the standard file layout... I get it conceptually, but then stuff gets so fragmented - binary files in usr instead of bin, how to track where installed stuff ends up, etc.

I'll figure it out one day, when I really need to... But that time hasn't come yet. A quick find in the terminal always gets me what I need.

Idk how popular it is, especially since it's Arch based, but went with EndeavorOS after not running Linux for a few years -- work machine mandated Windows and gaming compatibility was kinda sketch at the time. Heard Gaming compatibility had improved (it has) so wanted to try it out again.

Not afraid of troubleshooting issues I cause, and bleeding edge shenanigans, but a proper Arch install from scratch was still a bit daunting. So it seemed like a good middle ground, and access to the AUR sounded nice.

Been running it with KDE Plasma for a while, been going great! Some issues with Nvidia drivers here and there but hopefully going to upgrade and swap to AMD at some point.

Opensuse micro, I also run Nixos but opensuse does a really good job at using containers easily with distrobox

Guix, because I love nix but love lisp even more

Not sure if KDE Neon counts as a "less popular" distro, but it's what I've been using for around the last half year. I appreciate the stability of being based on the latest Ubuntu LTS along with the package availability of a Ubuntu-based distro, while also getting all the latest updates to KDE software and enough updates to other software to keep me satisfied. Snap is installed but not default (my system uses very minimal numbers of snaps as a result) and Flatpak is installed so I can also easily install software that's not in the Ubuntu LTS repos as a binary.

I'm a Slackware user, it does what I need without interfering and I can customize everything to my needs, no need to be forced to use systemd dbus pulseaudio and all those stuff.