I think nanolinux is underrated. It’s not in active development at this point, I was emailing the developer at one point. It uses nano-x in place of XWindows or Wayland. It also uses a lot of FLTK based apps and has some created or updated by the developer that you won’t see in other distributions including TinyCore which also uses a lot of FLTK based apps. I also liked Rogue Class Linux. It was a distribution for gaming and also worked without X. It had some interesting framebuffer based applications.
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OK, I had a look . Using FLTK makes it special. It sort of comes out as a huge effort for very little appreciation… I guess that means underrated?
You seem to rate innovative builds highly.
Revised 1/6/25
Puppy 3
Void 3
Alpine 3
Gentoo 2
Bodhi Linux 1
Slackware 1
Q4OS 1
Peppermint Devuan 2
PCLinuxOS 1 + (-1)
Nanolinux 1
Now some second mentions
Emmabuntus 1
Antix 1
Porteus 1
AVLinux 1
Rogue Class Linux 1
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Q4OS is underated
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OK, another vote for Q4OS
Revised 9/9/25
Puppy 3
Void 3
Alpine 3
Gentoo 2
Bodhi Linux 1
Slackware 1
Q4OS 2
Peppermint Devuan 2
PCLinuxOS 1 + (-1)
Nanolinux 1
Now some second mentions
Emmabuntus 1
Antix 1
Porteus 1
AVLinux 1
Rogue Class Linux 1
3 Likes
Just stumbled onto MODICIA OS, Caravaggio. Updated and built on Debian 13, it says it’s been around since 1998. Never heard of it, but it seems to be meeting all my requirements for a daily driver once I lightened up the dark Cinnamon screen. Don’t know if it meets the criteria for ‘underrated,’ but it sure seems to be a blast from the past with a new lease on life.
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It says it is for filmmakers, musicians, photographers, etc.
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Yes, Neville, those apps are included. But also included is the complete Libre Office suite as well as a full complement of general purpose application. Best yet, MODICIA OS is well-mannered: when given control of Grub, it politely includes all other OS partitions it can see. Many distros lose my interest when they don’t play well with others.
I maintain that it’s worth a look as a potential daily driver for its polish alone.
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My biggest gripe.
I refuse to install any distro that wants exclusive use of my disk
I dont really care what apps a distro loads. I can always load what I want or remove some. I do care about how the installer behaves , how well the package system works, does it have all the drivers I need, and the design philosophy. .
I have yet to find a distro that comes with R installed. Quite a few distros make a mess of setting up R as a package, so I often end up installing R from source code. The ones that package R properly are Void and Gentoo.
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Artix and Arch.
Linuxmint and Ubuntu are overrated.
Others are as good or even better.
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Welcome to our forum.
Only one vote, so lets go with Artix. I think Arch might be too popular to be called underrated..?
Revised 11/9/25
Puppy 3
Void 3
Alpine 3
Gentoo 2
Bodhi Linux 1
Slackware 1
Q4OS 2
Peppermint Devuan 2
PCLinuxOS 1 + (-1)
Nanolinux 1
Artix 1
Now some second mentions
Emmabuntus 1
Antix 1
Porteus 1
AVLinux 1
Rogue Class Linux 1
3 Likes
Yes,you are right about Arch.
Hmm,KDE Neon could be on your list aswell
Ilike a distro with not much preïnstalled.
That is why i have Artix and like Arch-based distro’s
Some linux-users are complaining about bloatware in Windows,but if i see how much some distro’s install.
Sorry,but if you don’t use a programm then that is bloatware too
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Yes. I prefer distros that start with a minimal install, then add what I want.
I an currently fiddling with Alpine and NetBSD… they both start with no DE at all.
The ultimate minimal distro is Gentoo… you start with a base system that is smaller than Alpine, and add everything.
Not sure about that… will have a look into it.
Its not my list… the forum made it. Collective opinion beats individual opinion.
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Thank you!
Great to be here.
Arch is starting with no desktop asswel and Artix and KDE Neon with a very minimal collection
You should try Arch with Mate minimal installed.
That is when you installed Arch and are at the point of installing a desktop,you go:
pacman -S mate lightdm lightdm-gtk-greeter mate-terminal
even mate-terminal is optional,but it makes live much easier.
You can als press Ctrl + Alt + F2 to get into the shell,but then you need to reboot to get back to the desktop
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I will stick with Artix, because it is non-systemd. I use the dinit init system .
Dinit is a few thousand lines of code, systemd is nearly 1.5 million lines of code… that is real bloat.
Mate would suit me. My usual DE is Xfce.
Dont like graphic login managers… they hang too often .
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I also stick with Artix as miy main O.S.
I have OpenRC with KDE
I have Arch,KDE Neon and Win11
And test a lot in Virtualbox.
Hmm,aren’t we going too much off-topic?
1 Like
Yeah, but we are really flexible here. Its too much of a hassle to keep shifting replies to new topics. Some of the best discussions happen at the end of an exhausted topic.
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Well, I like their focus on stability. On top of that, they allow for online upgrades (which is good for a desktop OS meant for beginners).
A stable rolling release distribution which uses .deb and focuses on the end-user would really have my preference.
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I didn’t write that they are bad.
I had Kubuntu myself,but found Artix better,but that is just my opninion and i do respect a difference of opninion.
Besides if you like something why should you switch. 
They aren’t rolling releases!
A rolling release means that you never have to upgrade.
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For me and my use. Linux mint is the best thing since sliced bread……
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It is difficult to obtain a Debian based rolling release, unless you use Debian testing.
Closest thing is MX… it is semi-rolling.
Did you know that Void Linux can handle .deb files… it converts them to.xbps.
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