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You should invest into a community run or community oriented distros like Arch, Gentoo, Alpine, Linux Mint etc
There can be no “community just shipping builds of RHEL code as, by definition, you cannot change anything. That means you cannot contribute. In my view, an Open Source “community” cannot just be people that use things for free. It is supposed to be about collaborating to build things.
At least now we have Alma Linux which strives to be ABI compatible with RHEL but builds it themselves from CentOS Stream. They actually build something. They can actually contribute (and they do). They can innovate. For example, they have continued the x86-64v2 builds even though RHEL has abandoned them. On Alma, you can at least claim to be building a community.
I do not use any of these distros by the way, in case you think I am shilling something.
When I was in college I didn't have my own computer so I relied on the Windows machines from the library.
That's when I discovered Slax and Puppy Linux [1] and all its different variants. Such a beautiful thing to boot into these pendrive distros and discover the world of Linux through them without altering the host system.
Good times.
Also,
> Entire Slax operating system resides in a single directory /slax/ on your device, making it easier to organize with your other data.
What's this? Is this like a NixOS-type distro?
There's also Porteus, also a Slackware derivative offering KDE Plasma -- https://www.porteus.org
Slax was and still is a great live distribution. The fact that (at least one of its flavors) is based on Slackware shows that the parent distro (Slackware) isn't that hard to use, something that few people believe. Slackware is in fact very simple in comparison to other distros.
I never ran Slackware Linux beyond that but the simplicity of being able to build a custom live USB through their web interface was amazing. I don’t think I’d have gotten as much of a head start with Linux had it not existed.
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