There was a bunch of weird rebadged Ubuntu derivatives back in the day.
Ubuntu satanic edition. https://archiveos.org/ubuntu-satanic/
Ubuntu Christian edition. https://archiveos.org/ubuntu-christian/
Hannah Montana Linux https://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/
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
Feren OS, a linux distro focused in customization. Started as a Linux Mint derivative, is now based on Ubuntu and/or Debian (I’m not really sure)
Everybody knows glorious leader’s operating system. 😉
There was this distro that stuffs everything of a package in one folder, instead of /usr/lib & co. What was it called again?
Gobolinux?
Right, thanks!
If being usable is a metric, Slackware
Hardly obscure.
How many ppl do you see rocking Slackware nowadays?
Still hardly obscure and usage metric is anything but precise. Slackware doesn’t have something like Debian’s popularity contest and distrowatch only meters page visits.
2 days ago my friend found an old SATA hard drive and gave it to me to check what’s on it, and me, not having a disk station or anything, and against all better judgment, I just swapped the disk in my laptop for my friend’s, and instead of my laptop being fried it turned out the disk was running something called Crunchbang Linux
I lived that distro. Unfortunately it got discontinued at some point.
I used to run Reborn OS at around 2017 for a few years. It used Cnchi installer, just like Antergos, and when Antergos died, I saw Reborn as its successor. But the title went to Endeavour (why?) and Reborn never got popularity.
Limiting to those I have used daily and treated as Linux (used the terminal for example) probably Maemo. I used to carry my Nokia Internet Tablet 770, and then my N800 everywhere with me.
Maemo is also an ancestor of both Tizen and Sailfish OS
One of the coolest distros, ever. It’s like a mix of Alpine Linux and Slackware without dangerous firmware payloads.
Of those I’be personally tried, certainly chimera linux or mageia
No one mentioned Bunsenlabs or Crunchbang Linux here, but they aren’t really that obscure.
Not really obscure
Archbang maybe more?
I see no one has mentioned Bedrock Linux yet. Not sure though how others would rate its ‘obscurity’ though. It’s definitely a standout among distros.
Shark Linux
