It's a real niche OS with a very different approach to setup and configuration than any other I've seen and tested. It's now my server Linux and after more than a year I'm still not sure if I would recommend it 😂

[–] Rekall_Incorporated@piefed.social 8 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

Aren't both Alpine and NixOS really big in certain enterprise areas? And NixOS and Alpine are both relatively well covered in news articles and posts.

When I think niche Linux distro, something more like GoboLinux comes to mind:

GoboLinux at a Glance - GoboLinux is a modular Linux distribution: it organizes the programs in your system in a new, logical way. Instead of having parts of a program thrown at /usr/bin, other parts at /etc and yet more parts thrown at /usr/share/something/or/another, each program gets its own directory tree, keeping them all neatly separated and allowing you to see everything that's installed in the system and which files belong to which programs in a simple and obvious way.

[–] Scipitie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

I tried more "niche from a popular perspective". You're right, especially alpine is in the background of a lot of docker containers but rarely an end user who just want their desktop environment knows them.

For nixos I've not yet seen anyone in the enterprise world pushing for it - there it's still all about containerization and orchestration in cloud environments, using that as reproducibility layer. That might change though with data sovereignty discussions going on.

[–] Specter@piefed.social 3 points 1 day ago

Love nixOS (my daily driver) but I wouldn’t call it obscure. It seems to be becoming as popular as Arch for people interested in experimental distros.

[–] rozodru@piefed.world 6 points 1 day ago

I’m still not sure if I would recommend it 😂

sounds like a NixOS user to me! I've been using NixOS as my daily driver for the past several months and I'm not sure if I would recommend it. It makes the hard things easy and the easy things hard. I love the fact that I can very easily pass kernel params or gpu settings via my flake. that's nice. that's easy. I don't like finding some random FOSS project I want to try out and then trying to determine what dependencies I need, if I have them all in my nix-shell, etc.

But honestly once you figure it out and set up distrobox on it you'll never need to distrohop again because you'll have everything on one OS.

[–] ceiphas@feddit.org 5 points 1 day ago

Alpine is not really obscure, it's THE clustering distro... Even Microsoft delivers alpine docker images for their dotnet stuff