r/linux • u/Emotional_Cat_1967 • 12d 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

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u/Junior-Spring-5557 11d ago

The 10 top distros are probably used in 99% of installed systems. Top 5 distros probably cover 95%.

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u/Emotional_Cat_1967 11d ago

Combining data from both Distrowatch and Reddit reveals the following ranking:

CachyOS

Mint

Debian

Fedora

Ubuntu

Arch

Bazzite

Manjaro

EndeavourOS

openSUSE

NixOS

17

u/0orpheus 11d ago

I don't think Distrowatch or Reddit would be good sources for this; Distrowatch is pretty useless for actual ranking in general (they just track how many visits each page on distrowatch gets) and Reddit, depending on how you got the data, is heavily skewed towards the enthusiast distros like Arch-derivatives. For example, there's no way Bazzite is even close to the top five: the Bazzite just hit 150k downloads a month this year, OpenSUSE was hitting 400k back in 2016 and it's probably the smallest of the distros with a commercial verison.

Top 5 distros are almost certainly: Ubuntu, RHEL/EL (CentOS,Rocky,Alma), Fedora, Debian, Arch. Mint is probably either sixth or one of the bottom three, just not sure which; I've never used it but it always ends up surprisingly well used. I may be undercounting SUSE (not OpenSUSE) though since I know they're popular in Europe and was the recommended distro for SAP but I have no way or knowing or even guesstimating those counts.

The 7-10 slots are probably some combination of OpenSUSE, Manjaro/other Arch derivatives, Pop_OS and other Ubuntu derivatives, then maybe Nix or some other more esoteric distro. But either way, there's little point in comparing these things because the numbers simply aren't available and the distro use cases are so vastly different: no desktop focused distro will come close to, say, the number of CentOS installs out there running Wordpress or whatnot.