I have a 1TB harddrive on my desktop computer that isn’t doing much of anything, so I’d like to dual-boot something “interesting”. Suggestions are greatly appreciated, so let me know what y’all find intriguing/interesting/frustrating/innovative.
The logo is just for attention, but EFF is a great cause that we should all support.
You want to try something interesting but want to dual-boot. That last bit could be difficult or “impossible” but using a VM or running from USB stick are options.
- https://www.haiku-os.org I’ve run it from USB stick on some older laptop.
- https://chimera-linux.org FreeBSD user-land with a Linux kernel.
- https://nomadbsd.org FreeBSD which can be run from USB stick with persistent storage. Has a version with ZFS support.
- https://nixos.org Very interesting concept.
- https://www.gobolinux.org GoboLinux is an alternative Linux distribution which redefines the entire filesystem hierarchy. Doesn’t seem up to date but quite interesting. If I remember well you can have different versions of software installed at the same time. Let’s say (making this up) Bash 1.1, 3.1 and 5.2
- https://bedrocklinux.org Bedrock Linux is a meta Linux distribution which allows users to mix-and-match components from other, typically incompatible distributions.
I was also going to suggest Haiku. It’s the spiritual successor to BeOs. I was always disappointed that didn’t become more popular.
Yes. Haiku is quite light weight, small and snappy. One drawback is that it has not yet multi user implemented (everything still runs as root! But so do old DOS flavors :-) ) but imho it is fun to play with and check which software packages it has (it has several emulators packaged).
BeOS on my old PowerPC blew my mind in the late 90s.
GhostBSD My pre-coffee self mistyped. I have a separate drive with my daily drive OS on their (Mint), and I have an additional separate drive that I’d like to do something interesting on. These are fun suggestions, so thank you!
I feel like Talos Linux is NixOS applied to a very specific purpose: kubernetes.
I’ve recently been playing with kubernetes, and talos linux feels like cheating.I think NixOS could has a huge market unexplored of server side deployments. Install NixOS, connect to the fresh install via a CLI tool, apply the patches (flakes?), and have an easy way to reset to base NixOS when you make a mistake so you can try a different set of patches.
All from the cli, all with idempotent config files.
Fedora silverblue
The main system OS is immutable and tracked by a git like system, which means to upgrade, or downgrade your whole OS to a release you just pull in the ‘tag’ you want, and it just does it.Can also side grade easily to respins of the OS using this too, just add the remote and pull in the image.
Oooh that’s a fun idea. Thank you!
As a rebase, I reccomend secureblue: https://github.com/secureblue/secureblue
Perhaps TempleOS and unholy forks of it?
Oh that could be fun
It’s really hard to go wrong with Debian.
That’s my safe answer.
If you share more about your interests, hobbies, I might have other ideas.
I suppose, when in doubt, there’s always Linux From Scratch. It’s a very interesting experience.
Except Debian is neither interesting nor innovative.
Debian is the Volvo of Linux distros.
More like Unimog.
Unimogs are exciting
Except Debian is neither interesting nor innovative.
How dare you!? /s
Yeah. Good point.
It’s very premise is the polar opposite of interesting or innovative. It’s pretty much the white bread of Linux: incredibly bland, but will fit into everything that requires bread.
I have another drive with Mint installed that I used as my daily do-things OS. For this, I’d like to devote a separate 1TB drive to something weird or interesting.
If you’re looking for interesting more than useful, may I present TempleOS.
. . . could you possibly unpresent it? I kid, I kid–this looks insane and I love it. Thank you!
If you have never heard of it before, I recommend checking out the wikipedia page for it, and some of the information available about its creator.
Wow, thanks! What an interesting read :O (But also really sad to watch the video on the templeos site)
Redox OS or React OS lol
I was gonna slap Kali on there for fun, but that’s a little obvious.
ReactOS is kinda piquing my interest.
Or instead of Kali check out ParrotOS
Kali is all about the tools. It is not more secure than the average linux system, actually the opposite most of the time. It is designed for red team hackers mostly. Still neat to poke around with. The same is true for ParrotOS
Qubes - an OS that compartmentalizes system functions (including userspace) into separate VMs, with the intent of keeping them secure from each other. Kind of an internal zero-trust approach. Complicated to use.
Alpine Linux - stripped down to create a reduced attack surface, with the intent to provide only packages which have been vetted for security. Fairly straightforward.
Redox OS - a Unix-like OS written in Rust (not actually Linux). Limited, still kind of a prototype.
Damn Small Linux has been revived with a new version recently, which is nice to see.
HoloISO - a community built reimplementation of the Steam Deck OS.
AROS (Amiga) Research Operating System
would run in an emulator or bare metal boot from separate media.
Oh look! Amiga’s still alive! Awesome, thank you!
opensuse aeon (Linux). Immutable and designed to just work and keep working. https://en.opensuse.org/Portal:Aeon
2nded. OpenSUSE in general is great imo. IIRC, OpenSUSE has the 2nd largest repo, after Arch Linux AUR
well actually… sry i couldn’t resist
i think the biggest repo is that of nixos
For something interesting, I suggest Qubes OS.
For a reliable workhorse, I would suggest Debian.
For a regular user, I’d suggest fedora workstation over Debian. Debian is old reliable, but the out of box experience for the user is clunky and missing some utilities and features. I had a tech friend of mine transition from windows and there were many small things that I hadn’t noticed would cause problems.
I still run Debian on many different devices, I like it quite a bit especially when distromorphed with Kicksecure.
There is also Linux Mint Debian Edition which switches the base OS used by Mint to Debian. Out of box experience with LMDE is much more user friendly.
NetBSD
based
Sugar, from One Laptop Per Child. it has like an entirely different UI paradigm or something, haven’t tried it
That’s intriguing, thanks for letting me know!
I haven’t had an opportunity to test it myself yet, but I’ve heard very good things about NixOS. The basic premise is that all of your system state, every config file in /etc, every package you have installed, everything, is defined by a single configuration file called configuration.nix. If you back up just your home directory and that file, you can plonk it into a brand new copy of NixOS, run a single command, and have it redownload and re-set-up everything else exactly how you left it.
I’ve been running NixOS on my framework laptop for almost a year now. I’m a huge fan.
The only thing I couldn’t get working was a flake + home-manager-as-a-module + sway setup, but I haven’t tried for 6 months or so.
Currently running flake + home-manager-as-a-module + COSMIC and it’s fantastic.
I’m running Nobara on my gaming PC, and was originally planning to switch to Bazzite if anything broke, but now I’m working on prepping my NixOS config for gaming.
Speaking of, how is NixOS for gaming? I remember trying it a while ago but not being able to get the Nvidia drivers working. I’ve since switched to a machine with AMD graphics though.
So far it seems just fine! I’m finding a few bugs here and there, but I think that has more to do with COSMIC than NixOS. I’m going to do some more testing on Plasma to narrow down where the issues are. You can see my config here:
https://github.com/thejevans/nix-config/blob/main/nixosModules/gui-applications/gaming.nix
Decided to take this as an opportunity to just go for it. It works great on my gaming PC with Plasma 6. I tested Balatro with Proton, and Baldur’s Gate III.
I have a Ryzen 5800X3D CPU and an RX7900XTX GPU.
Steam with Proton works OOTB for me if you enable the option in the system config.
It’s even better with flakes. I barely touched the surface but I just run nix run . boot all and rebuilds all systems with the same build / versions. This the run . Part executes a python script that loops through each host and runs nixos-rebuild. I run my k3s cluster with it.
