The latest quirky and creative Linux distros
Distro Zoo – Original & Derivative Distros
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This month we explore Liya Linux v2026.08.29, openKylin 3.0, Zenwalk GNU Linux Current-260905, and Spaced Linux 9.26.
Just as MC Hammer's "Too Legit to Quit" has endured for 35 years, Linux has a way of enduring too, even on computers that have supposedly reached the end of their useful lives. My girlfriend recently inherited a 2015 Intel MacBook that booted without trouble, but its installed copy of macOS High Sierra could no longer run many applications. This was not a hardware failure in the strictest sense of the term. The machine had simply been left behind by Apple's software support cycle and the wider application ecosystem.
This became a bugbear for many Windows users last October, when Windows 10 reached end of support. Some users found that their PCs could not officially upgrade to Windows 11 because they lacked TPM 2.0 support, a compatible processor, or other required hardware. Canalys (now Omdia) estimated that as many as 240 million PCs could become e-waste in light of this [1].
Hopefully, an alternative has already occurred to readers. Distros like Liya Linux promise to bridge the gap between age and obsolescence. It is not only a question of hardware compatibility. Modern operating systems can also make heavier demands on memory and storage. That is why I am delighted to report that the Slackware-derived Zenwalk used around 650MB of RAM at rest in our tests.
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