There are some distros like Debian, Ubuntu and Mint that are commonly used and everyone knows how good they are.
but
There are others that are used only by a few people and perform equally as well.
Would you like to nominate your choice for the most underrated Linux distro?
I will nominate Void Linux… it is No 93 on distrowatch and performs for me as well as MX Linux or Debian.
Dunno - even though I’ve barely ever used it - Puppy Linux - as it originated out of my adopted hometown - Perth West Australia (the maintainer was a computer science [engineering] lecturer at Edith Cowan University)…
The few times I’ve looked at it - it kept nicely to KISS (keep it simple stupid)…
Barry Kauler was the maintainer of Puppy Linux until about 5-10 years ago…
(by adopted - I’ve lived here since a youngish child - but was born in Newcastle NSW 3000+ km away)
As the only Australian distro, I have to agree.
People seem to think Puppy is a good diagnostic tool.
I think it is highly regarded but obscure, rather than underrated?
With you on puppy, but not as a daily use more a rescue tool. Plus its not as far down distrowatch.com as Neville example
After those free shipped Ubuntu CDs (back in mid-2000s), the second OS I heard of and used was Puppy. But yes like @callpaul.eu says, mostly as a rescue tool; never used as a regular OS. However, over the years I’m impressed by its robustness - its ability to boot and run on almost any PC/laptop config.
Gentoo Linux. Everybody seems to think it’s as unstable as unstable as Arch Linux, because of its rolling release nature. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Gentoo is rock solid - unless you decide to live on the bleeding edge. You can pick and choose which packages are used for testing, stable, or even straight from git - or whichever rcs you desire.
And then there’s the overlays which allow for further extension of the system. These integrate right into portage and you can give everything a priority rating, so you can have multiple repositories with the same thing in them.
Really, the Gentoo maintainers are some brilliant people.
Three votes for Puppy.
I must give it a try, just out of Aussie pride.
Last time I looked there was a confusing variety of puppies?
I absolutely agree. It is people who make a distro.
Portage is the best package system because it does not attempt to do things for you behind your back… and it therefore allows a lot more choices ( eg flags) than you get with something like apt.
The only thing near to portage would be the BSD ports system
I agree Gentoo is solid.
So why do people not rate it?
I think several reasons
Yes its a litter of puppies !
Last time I got one just choose the top version without really looking at the rest.
Perhaps next time I will check with the kennel club and the breeder before adoption…
but after using they can all be a bit of a dog, ok if you keep them on a lead and house train them, except for the little packages they leave and occasional accidents …
Saturday morning humour over my bowl of treats
I quite like that, using Gentoo and not needing to say it😁, btw
My latest test with Gentoo didn’t boot. I tried to install it to a pinebook pro and it is working if I chroot but the efistub is not bootable from tow-boot (arm system). So next I’ll try Void. Using Gentoo on that machine with binary packages is a “must”. Compiling GCC took appr 8 hours
Yes, gcc, llvm, {qt,gtk}-webengine, etc. are absolute beasts to compile. They need loads of RAM as well. That’s one of the reasons I stopped with Gentoo; I have more Megabytes than I have megaeuros and I couldn’t afford to expand the RAM of the machine I was running Gentoo on.
Yeah, RAM and CPU cores are in need when compiling. With pinebook pro I have only 4Gb. My vote for the topic is Void.
In general all is reflected in the following way:
It with the purpose to learn, survive and resolve problems with a distro
For example, many distributions mentioned in this thread are few times suggested for example in YouTube.
Official community has an impact too. I mean “Why a user should invest time with a distro if there is small/poor documentation and the official community (forum) gives few support?”.
Other important point I always take in consideration is:
If to reach the goal to install a specific distro and any program in that is required a lot of steps, it is bad symptom. It mostly to resolve dependencies.
My best comparison is:
Well I know exists, Snap, Flatpak etc …
my 2 cents
I love that. 2 votes for Void.
Jeepers - that is a lot of choices!
Last time I took a serious look at Puppy, it was still maintained by Barry Kauler, and, I think it was Slackware based (that was my first ever Linux distro)…
Now there’s a nested multitude of choices :
That’s a bewildering array of choices… and could well doom Puppy to oblivion, due to the sheer confusion… I just took a look at the Puppy mirror hosted at AARNET (Australian academic mirror - that’s where I found Slackware in 1995) - There’s like 40 subfolders!
I can’t see any ARM builds of Puppy at the Puppy website - but there are ARM choices at the mirror hosted on AARNET…
Next time I dig out my Samsung N150 “netbook” (for some reason the proprietary power brick, and the laptop - are never found together!) I might try out Puppy 32 bit on it… I reckon I’ll probably lump for the Slackware base…
That has me interested?
Why would they puppify so many different base distros?
Dam small linux used to fit on a floppy
The new goal of DSL is to pack as much usable desktop distribution into an image small enough to fit on a single CD, or a hard limit of 700MB.
Who still has a floppy drive that works
Or even floppy disks
I’ve used couple of different software Firewalls running Linux that ran on a single floppy disk…
Can’t remember the name of the main one - but you used their website to build your image (it was free) and it downloaded a floppy disk (1.44 mb for 3.5" floppy) image. IT worked quite well. Even gave you a HTTP page to configure/change various things… Worked just fine with ADSL…
The other one was called “Linux Router Project”… Maybe that latter one got rolled into OpenWRT? I didn’t really use it - it was more involved and technical than the previous one.
But - then I found IPCop / Smoothwall - which was an ISO image to install… That worked a treat for a few years actually…
Ran all of the above on a 486-DX 100 with 32 or 64 MB RAM…
I had a 486 dx66 with 128Mb ram . It was Vesa Localbus, not PCI.
It ran FreeBSD really well. Even ran a TWM window manager. Would not run a DE.
I first used X11 on Linux on a 386 with 8 MB RAM - it ran okay… No idea what the WM or DE (was it even a DE?) were… Maybe OLWM? I think it had “__WM” name - so yeah - just a window manager - not a full Desktop Environment…
I’d previously used X11 on Solaris sparc systems… Probably “OpenWindows” - but I also recall seeing the Motif look and feel of CDE.
Back then it wasn’t that different with Windows or Linux using X11.
Slackware 3.0 Linux : boot into TTY session, then run “startx”.
Windows : boot into MS-DOS and run “win” (I even set Windows 95 to work like this).
And that’s how I still run my desktop (due to some issue with GDM).
Pop!_OS 22.04 Linux : boot into TTY session, run “startx” 
(I kinda prefer it this way - I feel like I have more control)