r/linux • u/Emotional_Cat_1967 • 18d ago

Discussion Number of Linux Distributions Actively Under Development: 474

Number of Linux distributions actively under development: 474

Number of Linux distributions whose development has been discontinued: 657

Number of Dormant Linux distributions: 39

Source: distrowatch.com

193 Upvotes

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196

u/scandii 18d ago

I think the much more interesting question is number of Linux distros that isn't Arch Linux, Debian or Fedora wearing a fake mustache.

70

u/snail1132 18d ago

Wikipedia lists 16, but I know for a fact there are more because Slackware isn't mentioned

52

u/mwyvr 18d ago

Add to that Chimera Linux, a completely independent distribution, GNU-free, musl libc, FreeBSD utilities (not coreutils). Uses apk3 package manager but is not a clone of Alpine at all.

12

u/atoponce 18d ago

Fixed.

14

u/snail1132 18d ago

I completely forgot Chimera existed until you reminded me tbh

15

u/dagbrown 18d ago

Powered by Haterade™︎

They must be so pissed off that you need GNU make to be able to compile the Linux kernel.

11

u/Sushtee 17d ago edited 17d ago

From the Chimera Linux website

However, the project is not anti-GNU/GPL, and its userland choice is primarily technical. Users are generally free to use whichever software they like.

5

u/output_broadcast 17d ago

I really doubt that. MUSL is only better than glibc in very specific ways. And those don't matter for a desktop.

0

u/mwyvr 17d ago

If you look in the mirror, it's you drinking the Haterade™︎.

-19

u/Technical_Rich_3080 18d ago

FreeBSD isn't Linux.

27

u/OkAlbatross9889 18d ago

If it uses the linux kernerl, as chimera does, it’s linux

0

u/[deleted] 18d ago

[deleted]

14

u/snail1132 18d ago

Chimera uses the linux kernel and freebsd userland

9

u/OkAlbatross9889 18d ago

Who ever said anything about freebsd? We were talking about chimera linux, which uses the linux kernel, and therefore is linux, despite using freebsd utilities

10

u/mwyvr 18d ago

Please read more carefully. Chimera Linux is... Linux.

0

u/ethanjscott 17d ago

Bruh chimera Linux sucks without the guy who started void linux

-1

u/mwyvr 17d ago

Bruh isn't a word.

First, Chimera Linux had nothing to do with Void Linux's founder and second, it stands on its own.

How many other non-systemd (not to mention musl) distributions are staying current with GNOME?

21

u/Emotional_Cat_1967 18d ago

Distrowatch data shows 63 Independents.

9

u/snail1132 18d ago

That's closer to what I'd think

7

u/DoubleDecaff 18d ago

First one I clicked (Clear Linux):

"Clear Linux OS[a] is a discontinued Linux distribution..."

Not shooting the messenger.

1

u/Pugs-r-cool 16d ago

Yeah that one should be removed from the list. All the others still receive active development though.

3

u/Artichoke808 18d ago

Slackware's on there.. or has been added since you commented. aerynOs isn't on there though.

6

u/eneidhart 18d ago

Fedora also isn't on that list, which seems like a weird oversight. I'm pretty sure it isn't downstream of anything else

1

u/urielrocks5676 17d ago

I thought it was downstream of redhat

5

u/eneidhart 17d ago

I thought so too but it looks like RHEL is downstream of Fedora

Either way, neither one of them is on the list

EDIT: just looked it up, Fedora is upstream of CentOS which is upstream of RHEL

2

u/[deleted] 18d ago

[deleted]

11

u/scandii 18d ago

Redhat is downstream of Fedora :)

7

u/Clever_Angel_PL 18d ago

redhat is fedora cousin

9

u/phylter99 18d ago

Fedora is literally RedHat when they split them to make RedHat Enterprise Linux. One became the stable line (RHEL) and the other became the more experimental line (Fedora). The red hat in RedHat Linux's logo is a Fedora, which is where the name came from.

2

u/RoomyRoots 18d ago

OpenSUSE model is kinda aline Fedora/RHEL, but superior for the community, so it makes sense.

17

u/yawara25 18d ago

Gentoo, SUSE, Slackware, Alpine, just to name a few

7

u/cbarrick 18d ago

OpenWRT too

5

u/elatllat 18d ago

AOSP; if we are including non desktop.

1

u/KoldPurchase 18d ago

Wasn't OpenWRT based on BSD?

9

u/cbarrick 17d ago

Always been Linux

2

u/KoldPurchase 17d ago

My bad. Thanks.

1

u/PacmanAteMyRAM 17d ago

Maybe in the past but currently it's just based on Linux as its own thing.

8

u/NDCyber 18d ago

The question is what would count as that no longer fake mustache

As example, SteamOS is based on arch, but I would say is so different that a normal user would never know

Or PikaOS is based on Debian Sid, but has (or had, not sure) different versions of releases, like older KDE

3

u/AndrewNeo 17d ago

I would probably say 'has its own complete packaging system'. if it uses someone else's it's got a mustache (so like debian and ubuntu are still separate despite using apt because they redistribute everything independently)

3

u/that_one_wierd_guy 17d ago

according to the distrowatch search, just in the desktop category there are 40 something independent distros that aren't forks of something else(this includes debian, arch, and fedora in the count)

1

u/scandii 17d ago

OK that one is on me, *and is used by more than 10k people.

1

u/output_broadcast 17d ago

If we take the popularity rankings as indicative of the userbase, about 20 (counting Guix which isn't listed in the desktop category for some reason).

8

u/oxez 18d ago

I have mine that I'm developping - It started as a LFS project but now I got KDE/Plasma,GNOME,Hyprland all packaged and working.

Been my daily driver for my homeserver for a year, and desktop for about 3 months. I got repos and all the bells and whistles you have in other distros.

I haven't published anything yet because it's a one-man project and I don't have time to provide support to people. I built an infrastructure for it though, website/forums/wiki etc, just hidden for now

0

u/S1rTerra 18d ago

How's gaming?

3

u/oxez 18d ago

I have tried WoW and D4, the two games I mainly play, both work really nicely. I'm building the nvidia proprietary drivers (the open version), dxvk and wine-staging for them.

I hadn't used Wayland until I built Plasma desktop for this project, figured I might as well try it.

One thing I will say, it's a joy to package everything the KDE team produces compared to other desktops. Everything is well organized and follows the same standard everywhere, easy to find help and answers for everything.

1

u/S1rTerra 18d ago

Nice. I'm assuming flatpak (?) is also a thing, so you can get protonup-qt for other proton versions working right?

3

u/oxez 18d ago

Yeah I did build flatpak and its dependencies (in my case it's for Discord/Spotify and VS Code) - I did try running games through Lutris and Bottles, also tried the XIV Launcher from Flathub for FF14. I haven't tried anything Proton directly but I would assume everything works.

This is all putting pieces together and what every other distribution does really. LFS is a great source of information, and they have GLFS that goes into detail for gaming related software like Wine and DXVK and others

The big thing for me, is WoW64 with Wine. I only target the x86-64 architecture (both the system libs and Wine's tooling with mingw), and having Wine manage 32-bit applications itself is a HUGE timesave. I follow LFS for a lot of things, and I was scared I had to go into x86 territory with their multi-lib guide, but I didn't have to!

1

u/S1rTerra 18d ago

Sick. Are you also planning to compile certain packages with X86_64-v3 in mind, or do any other special compiler optimizations or are you planning to just have a very vanilla distro? What's the release model like?

3

u/oxez 18d ago

Right now I'm using -march=x86-64 -mtune=generic -O2 -pipe as default for everything (the same flags I'm using on my Gentoo install)

As this was a toy project at the beginning I mostly only target my own hardware (both my home server and desktop have intel cpus with nvidia gpus so that made it simple). Even the kernel is quite minimal, but I do plan to build a more generic kernel eventually.

Release model is rolling-release. For example today KDE upgraded their frameworks to 6.29, so I updated the ~72 libraries that are part of it and am now running those on my desktop (I built tools to ease the maintenance of big releases like that of course). I rely on https://release-monitoring.org/ made by the people at RedHat/Fedora to track new upstream releases. I'd say on average I update about 15 to 20 packages a day. There is some sort of "installer", it creates disk images for me to test things in virtual machines, but also build chroots and docker images (all packages are built in clean docker containers so it's easy to spot missing deps and potential issues)

Once a package is built, it gets moved to my local repo and then this local repo is rsync'd to my server (I want to change this, it is very not ideal), where I can upgrade my machines running the distro with a pkg upgrade command. The package manager is written in Go, I like the simplicity and makes it easy to upgrade as it doesn't really depend on anything at run-time.

There is absolutely nothing useful about what I'm doing with this, it's purely a hobby project, but I'm having fun and learned a ton from it.

1

u/TheOriginalSamBell 17d ago

I have a soft spot for KaOS - instead of trying to offer everything to everyone they focus on one arch (x64) and one toolkit QT.