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.

  • lemmyreader@lemmy.mlEnglish
    22·
    6 months ago

    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.
    • colournoun@beehaw.org
      8·
      6 months ago

      I was also going to suggest Haiku. It’s the spiritual successor to BeOs. I was always disappointed that didn’t become more popular.

      • lemmyreader@lemmy.mlEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        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).

    • Michael H. Jenkins@infosec.pubOP
      3·
      6 months ago

      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!

    • towerful@programming.dev
      2·
      6 months ago

      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.

  • axum@kbin.social
    15·
    6 months ago

    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.

  • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
    13·
    6 months ago

    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.

      • GreyBeard@lemmy.one
        3·
        6 months ago

        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.

        • flora_explora@beehaw.org
          1·
          6 months ago

          Wow, thanks! What an interesting read :O (But also really sad to watch the video on the templeos site)

  • NaibofTabr@infosec.pubEnglish
    7·
    6 months ago

    Qubes - an OS that compartmentalizes system functions (including userspace) into separate VMs, with the intent of keeping them secure from each other. Kind of an internal zero-trust approach. Complicated to use.

    Alpine Linux - stripped down to create a reduced attack surface, with the intent to provide only packages which have been vetted for security. Fairly straightforward.

    Redox OS - a Unix-like OS written in Rust (not actually Linux). Limited, still kind of a prototype.

    Damn Small Linux has been revived with a new version recently, which is nice to see.

    HoloISO - a community built reimplementation of the Steam Deck OS.

  • mox@lemmy.sdf.org
    6·
    6 months ago

    For something interesting, I suggest Qubes OS.

    For a reliable workhorse, I would suggest Debian.

    • Lemongrab@lemmy.one
      3·
      6 months ago

      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.

      • Lemongrab@lemmy.one
        1·
        6 months ago

        Kali is all about the tools. It is not more secure than the average linux system, actually the opposite most of the time. It is designed for red team hackers mostly. Still neat to poke around with. The same is true for ParrotOS

  • Michael H. Jenkins@infosec.pubOP
    4·
    6 months ago

    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!