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Best distro non-mainstream

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Stratus_ss

Overclockix Snake Charming Senior, Alt OS Content
Joined
Jan 24, 2006
Location
South Dakota
by non-mainstream I mean not Ubuntu/Fedora etc.

I am thinking Arch, I am looking for something a little more hands on, was thinking Debian minimal and build it myself or maybe LFS, though I want to stay away from Gentoo, traditionally I dont get along well with it for some reason.

EDIT: been wanting to try a rolling release distro for a while
 
I love Debian, but the minimal or netinst is not going to be exciting; it will insure that you have up-to-the-minute binaries though. If you want to compile it yourself but do not want Gentoo, then Arch is really the only other choice that I know of.
 
You want to try Arch. I've really enjoyed it since I installed. It's the best option there is for a rolling release distro, without too much fuss.
 
I don't know if you'd consider it mainstream but I <3 Mint

Mint is on every computer I touch (with the only exception being media centres which have mythbuntu)

I'll give arch a shot maybe this weekend when I have some time
 
ReactOS is a windows clone :)

I believe you have to pay for Elive. Not that that is a problem I would just rather test something before donating.
 
Gentoo or one of the BSD (free, open, net) flavors. Debian is fairly mainstream if you ask me.
 
Debian is fairly mainstream if you ask me.
One of the most mainstream distros around actually IMO. It is like the tree of life for just about all Apt/deb based distros.

Debian = Ubuntu = Mint - Minus a few tweaks per the wishes of the dev team tweaking it and a few repo changes.

The most non-mainstream things out in the Linux world.

http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/

For easier and nonhardcore releases. Look at the package managers. Rule out deb, and rpm, then you can narrow it down a lot.
 
Linux From Scratch is good if you want to learn about the internals of a Linux distribution.

We use FreeBSD at work for a lot of stuff- it's great, but I wouldn't use it for a desktop dsitribution. I understand it's possibly but very difficult, for instance, to get X working.

I personally use Debian.
 
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