I occasionally see love for niche small distros, instead of the major ones…
And it just seems to me like there’s more hurdles than help when it comes to adopting an OS whose users number in the hundreds or dozens. I can understand trying one for fun in a VM, but I prefer sticking to the bigger distros for my daily drivers since the they’ll support more software and not be reliant on upstream sources, and any bugs or other issues are more likely to be documented abd have workarounds/fixes.
So: What distro do you daily drive and why? What drove you to choose it?
Because I’m a software luddite that believe we peaked in design at BSD/Plan9, and most of the “innovations” of enshittified corporate mainstream distros (redhat userland, atomic/immutable environments, “universal” (unless you’re not on linux) package management) don’t impress me, and more often than not turn me away. I’m not saying software can’t improve, but when it comes to mainstream linux (especially redhat), innovation is always 0 steps forward 40 convoluted leaps back with bonus windows compatibility.
Not relevant to independent distributions, which I’d actually consider more of a problem with popular distros very often being forks (most often of debian).
So which distro do you use? Plan9 was never completed I think?
Plan 9 is still actively developed in the form of 9front; updates and new features trickle down to 9legacy from there.
The “original” Plan 9—meaning stock 4th Edition—is more of a museum piece at this point, though, yes.
Oh boy, I know where I’m losing my next free weekend
Just out of curiosity, what distro do you use?
Or maybe, despite the question, you use BSD? ( which is cool if so )
I use OpenBSD on my production machine and VPS, I use Alpine Linux on my phone. I’m also partial to Void Linux, though I don’t use it on any of my devices at the moment.