ArcaOS, KolibriOS, AROS, FreeDOS, Plan 9, TempleOS, or even just an older version of Windows or Linux.
What’s your use case? How’s your experience?
I occasionally use Haiku on an older laptop, just for fun.
I mostly use my Linux box for gaming, so Haiku is not the best fit for this.
I get ya. I use it on my Asus eee machine but it’s more due to the “because I can” mentality than anything practical.
I’m just waiting for someone to admit to using TempleOS as their daily driver
Any madman daily driving TempleOS is too powerful to be left alive.
What happens if you find someone like that? Temple OS has no Internet connection and is difficult to use. In fact, it is quite possible to use Haiku OS and even FreeDOS. You will just be using web versions of popular applications, that’s all. Even for DOS, there used to be a software package called Arachne browser. It is a static web browser, messenger, word processor and more.
TempleOS is cool. You don’t need the Internet, it establishes a direct connection to the Seventh Heaven in the process.
I hadn’t checked in on the HaikuOS project in well over a decade. It’s great to see all of the progress they’ve made!
Not as a daily, I do like seeing what obscure and old OSes I can get booting in UTM on my M1 Macbook though
Does NixOS count? I’ve been using it for a few months now and love it.
Care to tell me a bit about it?
Yeah! Nix is a declarative, reproducible operating system; so instead of changing configuration files for each service (wayland, ssh, etc.) you have an OS-level configuration file that configures and deploys all services. If the configuration works once, each time you apply the configuration (to any computer) it will work in exactly the same way again. Changing this configuration file creates a new “generation” of the operating system, and you can switch seamlessly between generations – so if your wayland changes brick your system, it’s really easy to roll back. It’s also really easy to test things and roll forward.
The downside is that this configuration file comes with a lot of syntatical magic that requires reading a ton of source code. You also have to learn the Nix programming language, which is relatively simple by itself; but the way it interacts with your servers can be really opaque.
If you’re a programmer or really excited by the idea of a declarative, reproducible operating system, you will seriously love it. If you’re more of a Linux enthusiast… not so much.
I do! I daily drive SourceMage Linux. I found it while I was spelunking distrowatch (along with its brother, lunar linux - they both branched from sorceror back in the day) I ended up having so much fun tinkering with it I ended up writing some spells (packages) for it and ended up getting pulled on as a spell maintainer :) I don’t really have a use-case for it; Before it, I was hopping between arch and void linux. I do really enjoy the freedom I have though with SMGL - it’s a source-based distro, so it’s similar to Gentoo in a sense. Plus I just enjoy having a deeper look into things! I break stuff often and sometimes spells don’t install correctly/have problems but solving those issues just makes it that much more fun :) I do highly recommend it for anyone looking into trying out a source-based distro and Gentoo doesn’t interest them. (we’re #sourcemage on libre.chat IRC, come say hi if you’d like, or if you need help installing, i’ll happily walk anyone through the process!)
I haven’t touched SourceMage in over a decade, but I loved how the terminology made it feel like you’re a wizard casting spells to build up everything.
I could never get it working 100% but if I can find a good burner laptop I might just have to give it a go again.
Yeah it’s honestly hard to get set up - we haven’t had a new ISO in a solid decade so the only way to install currently is via tarball. Our installation guide though is pretty good, and we’re always happy to help people getting it up-and-running :) I’m in the IRC 24/7 for the most part so i’m always available to assist. If you decide to, i’ll see you in there! As for a burner laptop - you can install SMGL on just about any device (we have 32-bit support still!) I have SMGL installed on a few of my netbooks ;) … compile times are less than savory though lol, 1+ day for glibc compilation, the misery…
(I will note though that the only huge downside to SMGL is that we don’t have multilib support - 64-bit is 64-bit only, which means no native things like Steam that require 32-bit libs)
(( we have workarounds though, i’ve added flatpak to SMGL and steam runs perfect in it!))
is ReactOS really obscure? 😅
HaikuOS is covered mostly by action retro in Youtube, it’s okayish… mostly I think tabbing and the UX design of Haiku is useful for me…
I even imitate it in XFCE Fedora Spin
I want to use Sailfish on my phone. It’s really intuitive and far nicer to look at than Android. I used to daily it three or four years back, and I picked up an Xperia 10 IV last year in the hopes it would get a release as the 10 I, II and III have previously. Alas it appears less and less likely each day.
I wonder why they haven’t pulled the trigger on that. I haven’t kept up to date on Sailfish since I accidentally put my 10 through the wash
nope. I use Debian Test. I keep it simple.
Does Qubes OS count? I’ve been using Fedora Silverblue as my daily for years, and Qubes really isn’t that different especially with the Fedora templates. The default XFCE4 desktop is UGLY so I had the tweak it a bit to be more Gnome-ish. (I once installed Gnome in dom0 but didn’t like the experience). I like the privacy benefits of Linux and disposable template VMs as well as added security with Qubes.
Thanks, I’ve never heard of ArcaOS, AROS or MorphOS before. Always nice to find new things.
I don’t daily drive them as they don’t really seems like daily drivers. I’d be surprised if even the devs manage that. Temple OS is really only useful if you want to align with the divine, Plan9 could be doable if all you do is code and appreciate acme but even then it’s a research OS that’s meant to be deployed on a network, everything is a file!, but seems to mainly target just running as a vm.
I tend to play around with linux and bsd, occasionally even hurd, as they seem to have better potential for getting basic ‘daily driver’ functionality even in obscure niches.
The Glaucus dev has an nice https://github.com/firasuke/awesome of projects that inspired them to create a beautiful little daily driver linux OS. I tested Glaucus a few years ago but my current systems are ancient and Glaucus is targeting new tech, which is nice.
