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.
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!
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.
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.
Except Debian is neither interesting nor innovative.
Debian is the Volvo of Linux distros.
More like Unimog.
Unimogs are exciting
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.
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.
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.
Sugar, from One Laptop Per Child. it has like an entirely different UI paradigm or something, haven’t tried it
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.
something interesting you say. source mage linux. https://sourcemage.org/ its more up to date than it seems. look at the repo.
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!
freedoss 9front Uxn(more an emulator but still interesting to check out its by 100 rabbits) openbsd netbsd dragonflybsd etc…
New to you or new to the world?
Either way, just looking for something interesting to play with.
Redox OS or React OS lol
For something really interesting, try GhostBSD, or one of the other BSDs (free, open, net)
NetBSD
Perhaps TempleOS and unholy forks of it?
Oh that could be fun
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
Void, stable, fast, not a fork, also is using runit