In my experience, the most innovative distributions include NixOS and GNU Guix System (Nix influenced it): determinism/correctness, pure functional paradigm, declarative, atomic, departing from FHS for good, … And they are pretty useful currently: Nix has the most packages, both are declarative so can easily reuse the configuration and apply in infrastructure as code, can rollback, can use for development (basically a way better alternative to Docker), can use in other distributions and Nix even on MacOS… Nix community being generally more practical, agile and flexible, while the GNU Guix community enforcing more correctness (building everything in their repositories from source including all transitive dependencies) and software freedom as GNU/FSF defines.
Other distributions I could include are musl based ones, Clear Linux, Fedora SIlverblue, OpenSUSE MicroOS, and projects like sel4, Theseus OS, but I don’t have much experience with them to describe them fairly. So please lets discourse about innovative distributions and operating systems, those which you have experienced, which you may be excited about.
will read more on nixos then.
looked a long time ago and the selling point was just calling the common practice of a install-script black magic. …yeah install scripts are not standardized across distros, but they did start one from scratch too so :shrug and while that is nice, dockerfiles are more popular now, for better or worse (it’s for worse)
what i call a meme is all the promises that config sharing fixes all problems. yeah you can share your facy declarative build setting with 7tb of ram and running all compilers as root to rebuild your package, but i won’t touch it on my systems.
rest all seemed pretty unixy underneath.