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

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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

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 :)

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Guix, because I love nix but love lisp even more

Bodhi Linux. I have an old hp desktop and it only has 2 gb of ram and 2 cores. I wanted a real lightweight distro and settled on arch linux but one day i tripped and knocked the tower over. When i booted it back up i had the infamous blinking underscore. I tried reinstalling arch multiple times and it kept failing, so i tried a lightweight arch based distro called archbang, same issue. I tried manjaro same issue.

At this point i wanted to try something not arch based but wanted something that came with minimal preinstalled programs like arch. Research led me to bodhi which is a light weight distro based on ubuntu. Installed with no issues and been using it ever since, about 3 years now.

Don't know what i damaged on the motherboard but it must have been something integral to arch based distros, but i'm kind of glad it happened because i love bodhi now

It has allowed an ancient computer to do so much. I've run matrix servers and web servers, written my own webapps to run on it and so much more

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.

NixOS. Nothing better for a server

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.

Don't know if this counts - used Fedora KDE for about a decade and then last year moved to Fedora Kinoite. It's essentially the same, but is OSTree based and immutable. I like the solid base, the rebasing function and containers

I guess SteamOS? It's immutable and... well runs on the SteamDeck which is pretty cool. I use it to play, obviously, but also to work. Love it.

Artix, Systemd.

Garuda Linux, if that counts. It's the best and most beginner friendly arch based distro imho. I need wine-staging and it comes packaged for arch which is very nice since I keep having troubles with it on non arch based disteos. On debian for instance it broke with every update, damn winehq install.

My fav obscure distros are: 1. Sparky Linux, Debian based simple stable system. It has many flavours with a lot of desktops to choose from. Also has stable and semi-roling iso. Now I never installed Debian itself, so can't compare sparky with Debian. But it is very much better than any other distro I used. I don't know why it is not popular. 2. Reborn OS. I used to love it when running. Arch based lovely project. This is the very much successor of Antergos.

I use MX, formerly know as Mepis. Super stable and kept up to date. It used to be Debian based and they still use some Debian repos but it's largely independent now

I’m curious if anyone dailies Alpine for desktop use. (I don’t.)