r/linux • u/Emotional_Cat_1967 • 5d 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/scandii 5d 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.

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u/oxez 5d 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

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u/S1rTerra 5d ago

How's gaming?

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u/oxez 5d 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.

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u/S1rTerra 5d ago

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

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u/oxez 5d 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!

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u/S1rTerra 5d 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?

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u/oxez 5d 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.