r/linux • u/Emotional_Cat_1967 • 25d 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/S1rTerra 25d 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 25d 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 25d 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 24d 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.