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.
something interesting you say. source mage linux. https://sourcemage.org/ its more up to date than it seems. look at the repo.
freedoss 9front Uxn(more an emulator but still interesting to check out its by 100 rabbits) openbsd netbsd dragonflybsd etc…
Updates: We are currently running Fedora SilverBlue, which is a very pretty OS as they go.
We won’t stop with that, though, so keep the suggestions coming!
For something really interesting, try GhostBSD, or one of the other BSDs (free, open, net)
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.
How dare you!? /s
Yeah. Good point.
Debian is the Volvo of Linux distros.
More like Unimog.
Unimogs are exciting
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.
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.
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.
Steam with Proton works OOTB for me if you enable the option in the system config.
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.
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
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
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.
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.I was also going to suggest Haiku. It’s the spiritual successor to BeOs. I was always disappointed that didn’t become more popular.
BeOS on my old PowerPC blew my mind in the late 90s.
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).
New to you or new to the world?
Either way, just looking for something interesting to play with.
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.
As a rebase, I reccomend secureblue: https://github.com/secureblue/secureblue
Oooh that’s a fun idea. Thank you!
NetBSD
Void, stable, fast, not a fork, also is using runit
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.
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.