Not super obscure, but not many talk about it. Q4OS, I love it, a perfect windows replacement down to even imitating the old style windows installer. Plus it's Debian based so it has a lot of support. I plan on moving my grandparents to it when windows 10 gets fully discontinued as their current rig doesn't support 11
Linux
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Longene Linux. Linux-based operating system kernel intended to be binary compatible with application software and device drivers made for Microsoft Windows and Linux.
Kiss linux. Gobolinux. They are both alien, but interesting, each one in its own way.
postmarketOS. Way too underrated.
Thank you 🤗 I hope not too many people see us as obscure though...
templeos /j
dyne:bolic - specifically 1.4.1
Had support for the original Xbox, a multimedia editing / streaming focussed OS. I'd never run it on mine - just messed with xdsl before going back to XBMC.
Hot Dog Linux, X11 Window Manager with Windows 3.1 Hot Dog Stand, Amiga Workbench, Atari ST GEM, Mac Classic and Aqua UI
Bohdi linux. smoll and beautiful. Used to run it on my eeepc 701
That's a blast from the past! I used to run #! On my 701...
Bohdi is pretty nice. Needed a Linux test device at a job a few years ago and for some reason this was one of the only ones approved. Was pretty solid for the few times I needed to use it.
Meego, a combination of Intel's Moblin and Nokia's Maemo. It only ever shipped on one device, the Nokia N9.
I much enjoyed it back in the day. Nokia even had their own app store for it and gave a nice financial incentive for the first hundred or thousand apps.
I feel Jolla & SailfishOS is the spiritual successor.
Not really, at least in sites like gutefrage (german site where the biggest dumbasses of the world unite) There were a lot of questions about them trying to use it as their first Linux distro because they magically care about privacy
Maybe not some obscure ones, but here are some lesser known ones:
Talos Linux. It's an immutable operating system designed specifically to deploy kubernetes.
OpenSuse Harvester Think Proxmox, but instead of VM's and LXC containers, it's VM's and Kubernetes.
XCP-NG is a RHEL based distro designed for managing Linux virtual machines using the xen hypervisor, as opposed to KVM. Think Proxmox, but RHEL and Xen (also no LXC). However, it does not come with a web ui out of the box, you have to deploy it yourself. Technically, XCP is a Xen distribution, since Xen is a kernel with nothing but a hypervisor that runs under the main distro, but the primary management virtual machine is RHEL based, and uses Linux.
Speaking of Proxmox, Proxmox is technically a Linux distro.
SnowflakeOS is a project that aims to bring a GUI focused experience to NixOS.
TurnkeyLinux (site is loading very, very slowly for me right now) is not a single distribution, but rather a set of debian based distributions that are designed to be turnkey appliance virtual machines that contain and host a specific app. To deploy the app, all you have to do is set up the virtual machine.
Now, here are some not-linux, but interesting distros:
SmartOS. They ported KVM to unix, and also can use Linux syscall translation (similar to wine) to run apps in containers as well. There is also Bhyve. It's a very interesting hypervisor platform.
OmniOS is similar. Bhyve, KVM, and Linux syscall translation in containers.
Microsoft Windows.
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/
Ubuntu CE outlived Ubuntu Satanic. W.
Technically it died and was resurrected.