[still_grokking]

There are of course some niche distris that aren't based on the "big ones".

But I'm not sure Slackware is still at this point relevant enough to be named in a row with the others I've mentioned.

Of course the sampling was subjective, and I didn't intended to marginalize any not mentioned distris. I just thought the others are too niche to be included in such kind of pick.

[igetspam]

I want to downvote you for sentimental reasons. I won't but I want to.

[still_grokking]

Do it, and tell the world how I mistreated all kinds of interesting (but small) projects, if it makes you feel better. :-D

Here a list of almost all the OS distris I've left out:

https://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=All&category=All&o...

Besides mentioning Slackware for historical reasons I should have also mentioned NixOS, which I forgot.

The former was the first Linux distri, the later gained some respectable user-base in the last years, I think.

Ah, and there is also Alpine which you can see sometimes here and there. (People using it in containers for reasons I've never understood as that's imho a recipe for trouble.)

But if you look at the rest of the list most of the stuff is really obscure. (I've tried some Solaris derivatives and Exherbo in the past but didn't even heard of all the other names.)

[nortonham]

why is using alpine for containers a recipe for trouble?

[still_grokking]

TL;DR: It's slow and has all kinds of issues. If all you want is small containers use Distroless.

Musl is still a kind of experiment. I would not recommend running experiments in production…

Just a few random links:

https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/benchmarking-debian-vs-alpine...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28312433

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/musl-libc-alpines-greatest-we...

https://martinheinz.dev/blog/92

https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-software-2/mu...

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/729342/performance-...

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/70108

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23080290

https://vector.dev/highlights/2020-07-09-add-musl-and-glibc-...

There are more. Much more of those!

Musl exist in large parts just for ideological reasons. It still rides some hype in industry as industry hates GPL software…

[nortonham]

Thanks for the links. I'm just an hobbyist, but Alpine is often marketed as being great for containers. Interesting to see another perspective