Just about every week on the PCMech LIVE show I am asked (more or less), "Where do I go to get a list of Linux distros that people actually use?"
The answer I always give is DistroWatch. Is that place the be-all/end-all for all things Linux? No (because there are many), but it’s a darn good start to get the news on what’s going on with different distros.
On the right sidebar there is a list of 100 different Linux distributions sorted by hit ranking. This gives an indication of what’s being actively used/developed. It is not by any means a master list, but like I said it gives a good indication on what you can try out that other people use.
As of this writing, the top 10 are:
- Ubuntu
- openSUSE
- Mint
- Fedora
- Debian
- Mandriva
- PCLinuxOS
- MEPIS
- CentOS
- Puppy
Want to see the rest? Check out DistroWatch for yourself.
What sites do you go to for Linux distro information? Are they better or worse than DistroWatch?
Write a comment and let us know.
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Distrowatch Weekly unmoderated readers comments are like blood drops on a white dress. Ive been totally turned off by that site for quite some time.
tuxmachines.org
It’s hard to get a good statistic on a product that’s not sold in stores. I think that many people get their distros from magazine or book inserts and P2P downloads. As Linux users we know the close relationship between distros that DistroWatch separates out. Ubuntu and Mint for example. Nevertheless I would agree that the Distrowatch top 10, taken as a whole, are a good indication of what people are actually using.
Desktop Linux is unreliable junk. If you can even get it to work properly, it’ll fail within a short time period.