Once lauded for its sane defaults, the latest Ubuntu release has usability issues.

DebianDog is very small Debian Live CD shaped to look and act like Puppy Linux. Debian structure and Debian behaviour are untouched and Debian documentation is 100% valid for DebianDog. You have access to all Debian repositories using apt-get or synaptic.

An independent Linux® distribution with a focus on simplicity and the concept of “less is more”. The distribution targets only the x86-64 architecture and the English language. “Simple can be...

Slax is a modern, portable, small and fast Linux operating system.

Debian-based, takes around 300MB.

OpenMediaVault is the next generation network attached storage (NAS) solution based on Debian Linux. It contains services like SSH, (S)FTP, SMB/CIFS, AFS, UPnP media server, DAAP media server, RSync, BitTorrent client and many more.

Small. Simple. Secure.

Alpine Linux is a security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution based on musl libc and busybox.

The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help you create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products regardless of the hardware architecture. It was founded in 2010 as a collaboration among many hardware manufacturers, open-source operating systems vendors, and electronics companies to bring some order to the chaos of embedded Linux development.

In response to the Snowden revelation that the CIA compromised Apple developers' build process, thus enabling the government to insert backdoors at compile time without developers realizing, Debian, the world's largest free software project, has embarked on a campaign to to prevent just such attacks. Debian's solution? Reproducible builds.

Reproducible builds, as the name suggests, make it possible for others to reproduce the build process. "The idea is to get reasonable confidence that a given binary was indeed produced by the source," Lunar said. "We want anyone to be able to produce identical binaries from a given source."

Nix is a purely functional package manager. It allows multiple versions of a package to be installed side-by-side, ensures that dependency specifications are complete, supports atomic upgrades and rollbacks, allows non-root users to install software, and has many other features. It is the basis of the NixOS Linux distribution, but it can be used equally well under other Unix systems.