Linked by Eugenia Loli-Queru on Sun 30th Mar 2003 07:47 UTC
Yes, we all know the "big three" (Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE) commercial distros, we also know the next big bunch of respected traditional/geek distros (Debian and Slackware and some might add Gentoo too in this list), and we know the "other big three" in the desktop Linux area (Lindows, Xandros, Lycoris). However, not everyone knows what is available besides this "threshold". Here is a list of Linux distros that worth knowing about and to keep an eye on! 
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I got some info on SourceMage from one of their developers who is looking to port their development tools to GNU/Hurd (Gentoo is working on a Hurd port, too....). Since I had a free partition on the notebook, I went ahead and downloaded their ISO, and tried them out.
"Casting" programs works almost as well as Gentoo's portage. They seem to do less with patches than gentoo does, however. Also neat, the "spells" to make programs for the distro, to me, are much easier to understand than ebuilds. It uses SysV init, which is always a big plus to me. In fact, that's the thing that annoys me the most about Gentoo -- the BSD init.
This is not to say that SourceMage is perfect. I had some problems with the install, mainly because I was trying to be too hands-on with it. It's much easier to install than Gentoo. Essentially, all you have to do is untar the system and build a kernel. There's no choice of cron or system logger -- you use the stock stuff. But the things they've chosen seem to work pretty well.
As for the other distros I use, I mainly run Debian (unstable on the desktop, stable on the servers), with a smattering of Gentoo (mostly on my G3), and occasionally RH or Mandrake (to see what's up with the new releases).
I also run NetBSD and FreeBSD from time to time. NetBSD, despite being BSD, I do enjoy using.
I also play around with GNU/Hurd, which is much more promising than GNU/Linux distro du-jour. :-D