An interesting trend graph of the most diffused distros and their adoption by users over time.
I was just looking at this graph and thinking of posting it here… thanks for saving me the trouble! I only had a couple of thoughts (and accepting the data comes only from ProtonDB and I’m a gamer so this makes the data especially interesting): it’s nice to see Arch and Arch-based distros doing so well; if you add them together they’re quite a large block, and I’m also not sad about Ubuntu’s falling share (it’s become very corporate - at least that’s my feeling, I don’t follow such stuff very closely). Oh, and I just tried out Nobara and was very impressed with it as a gaming distro (I got better FPS playing Warframe than I did on Windows 11) and it’s good to see that getting a small but growing share.
Pop has not received feature updates for years, because the dev team focuses on implementing Cosmic.
Given the overall progress of Linux Desktop environments, this might have led many users to switch away from Pop.
I’m guessing Arch’s dominance is largely due to SteamOS?
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I didnt realise that Arch adoption was so high. I (don’t) use arch, BTW. Although now I feel like I want to give it a spin to see what all the fuss is about!
Or maybe I’ll stay fat, dumb, and happy with Fedora and Nobara on my desktop and laptop.
Not that it would change anything for me personally, but I really think Pop! OS is a poor naming choice. Who puts an exclamation mark in their name? Aside from Yahoo! I suppose.
Who puts an exclamation mark in their name? Aside from Yahoo! I suppose.
And Westward Ho!
Stick with Fedora and Nobara, they are good distros. I use Arch myself, because I like that bleeding edge, bro - but if those other distros are working for you, there’s pretty much no reason for the average person to switch.
Nobara is sooo hyped. It is not a secure Distro. They literally
- do tons of weird stuff with Apparmor and literally disable SELinux “because its easier to work with” (fedora variants are the only Distros using it, which is such a security advantage!)
- add tons of packages
- modify GNOME to make it very strange
- delay an update for over a month
I recommend to use bazzite.gg if you want Gaming. They do all the Nobara fixes but
- immutable
- daily updates
- SELinux intact
- various spins for every hardware, including custom Kernels and tweaks
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=nwD88hxOykk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Arch was great for teaching me about Linux. It was rough, I completely borked my system about 3-4 times in the course of about 10 months lol. But it taught me valuable lessons on how to fix a destroyed system, how to use Timeshift to rollback changes, how to patch drivers and specific system packages, etc.
Ultimately, it was the constant fiddling that got me to go away from Arch and towards Nobara for my main gaming PC. I just wanted an OS that was stable, had great gaming performance, and didn’t require me to install a bunch of obscure packages and tools like Arch needed to get certain things to work.
Nobara has been fantastic so far and is probably my go-to distro recommendation for folks who plan on gaming hard on Linux, their pre-included kernel patches and utilities like Protonup-QT are awesome for gamers.
I installed LMDE on my work IT laptop recently and overall I like it. Have had a few annoying bugs because of Debian’s old packages, but everything is ironed out now and it’s great. Something stable and basic that gets out of the way for me to do my job.
Personally, I think they should make LMDE the default version of Linux Mint.
Debian -> Ubuntu -> Linux Mint vs Debian -> LMDE
Since it’s more upstream, it should be more up-to-date and secure, right?
I feel like basing a distro off of Ubuntu is sort of a crutch. It’s makes things easier at the beginning, but ultimately it holds you back as a distro developer
Pop is stagnant while they work on Cosmic. I’m one of the people who left because of that.
I’m not using Pop, but am somewhat interested in their development. In what way is it stagnant?
No new version will be released until Cosmic is ready.
Edit: I don’t intend to badmouth S76 here. I love PopOS, it’s the distro that made me a Linux fulltimer. Cosmic looks great so far. However the last major release of PopOS was in early 2022.
Isn’t this pretty much the Ubuntu LTS schedule? Linux Mint has been tracking the LTS as well.
I am still actively maintaining Pop!_OS. COSMIC has not changed that aspect of my job. Just within the last week I packaged Linux 6.6.8, Mesa 23.3.2, Just 1.22, Rust 1.75.0, and updated Popsicle’s dependencies to fix a bindgen build error with recent versions of Clang. We have a systemd update that was packaged today, and I’ll be doing another linux-firmware backport soon. So I don’t understand why you’d think it is stagnant. We’re even shipping Pipewire 1.0.0 by default, which Ubuntu hasn’t yet done in the latest version. People usually complain that we update too often.
Stagnant was probably the wrong choice of word. Perhaps “stable” (in the Debian sense) would be more apt, and that isn’t for everybody. I think you will see a HUGE influx once Cosmic launches.
It’s not stable in the Debian sense. We’ve always had rolling release updates for the system base; and people often complain about regressions in Linux, Pipewire, Mesa, and NVIDIA updates. I get them packaged shortly after they’re released. As long as they pass QA tests in the System76 hardware lab, they get released within a week.
