An interesting trend graph of the most diffused distros and their adoption by users over time.
It’s probably best to take this whole graph with a grain of salt. There’s already some questionable relationships in it, like for every 4th Manjaro user coming in a Gentoo user, which I find hard to believe to say the list.
Second, it’s hard to say Pop exclamation mark underscore OS is on the decline when the whole field just looks more diversified in general. Sure the hype around gaming distros from the lockdowns seems to have cooled down a bit, but there isn’t any distro that just disappeared. On the contrary, it seems to have gotten just more.
As already mentioned, we can expect another hype again when Cosmic DE launches.Yeah, I love me some Flatpak distro ;-)
On the serious note, I’m sad openSUSE is so low. Tumbleweed’s great distro!
Pop is stagnant while they work on Cosmic. I’m one of the people who left because of that.
I’m not using Pop, but am somewhat interested in their development. In what way is it stagnant?
No new version will be released until Cosmic is ready.
Edit: I don’t intend to badmouth S76 here. I love PopOS, it’s the distro that made me a Linux fulltimer. Cosmic looks great so far. However the last major release of PopOS was in early 2022.
Isn’t this pretty much the Ubuntu LTS schedule? Linux Mint has been tracking the LTS as well.
Mint has released 3 versions based on Ubuntu Jammy, though.
An interesting trend graph of the most used distros for gaming and their adoption by users over time.
Yeah, the article mentions it in the first few sentences, but OP sure did bury the lede.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I didnt realise that Arch adoption was so high. I (don’t) use arch, BTW. Although now I feel like I want to give it a spin to see what all the fuss is about!
Or maybe I’ll stay fat, dumb, and happy with Fedora and Nobara on my desktop and laptop.
Not that it would change anything for me personally, but I really think Pop! OS is a poor naming choice. Who puts an exclamation mark in their name? Aside from Yahoo! I suppose.
Stick with Fedora and Nobara, they are good distros. I use Arch myself, because I like that bleeding edge, bro - but if those other distros are working for you, there’s pretty much no reason for the average person to switch.
Nobara is sooo hyped. It is not a secure Distro. They literally
- do tons of weird stuff with Apparmor and literally disable SELinux “because its easier to work with” (fedora variants are the only Distros using it, which is such a security advantage!)
- add tons of packages
- modify GNOME to make it very strange
- delay an update for over a month
I recommend to use bazzite.gg if you want Gaming. They do all the Nobara fixes but
- immutable
- daily updates
- SELinux intact
- various spins for every hardware, including custom Kernels and tweaks
Arch was great for teaching me about Linux. It was rough, I completely borked my system about 3-4 times in the course of about 10 months lol. But it taught me valuable lessons on how to fix a destroyed system, how to use Timeshift to rollback changes, how to patch drivers and specific system packages, etc.
Ultimately, it was the constant fiddling that got me to go away from Arch and towards Nobara for my main gaming PC. I just wanted an OS that was stable, had great gaming performance, and didn’t require me to install a bunch of obscure packages and tools like Arch needed to get certain things to work.
Nobara has been fantastic so far and is probably my go-to distro recommendation for folks who plan on gaming hard on Linux, their pre-included kernel patches and utilities like Protonup-QT are awesome for gamers.
I installed LMDE on my work IT laptop recently and overall I like it. Have had a few annoying bugs because of Debian’s old packages, but everything is ironed out now and it’s great. Something stable and basic that gets out of the way for me to do my job.
Personally, I think they should make LMDE the default version of Linux Mint.
Debian -> Ubuntu -> Linux Mint vs Debian -> LMDE
Since it’s more upstream, it should be more up-to-date and secure, right?
I feel like basing a distro off of Ubuntu is sort of a crutch. It’s makes things easier at the beginning, but ultimately it holds you back as a distro developer
Who puts an exclamation mark in their name? Aside from Yahoo! I suppose.
And Westward Ho!
Panic! At the Disco
i think the high arch use is mostly steam deck users running steamos.
This talk gave me a realistic set of expectations about Arch, and made me wanting to stick to Fedora even though they didn’t talk positively about it for the most part
PopOS is what got me into Linux, and the only one that worked “out of the the box” for the handful of things I wanted, esp remote desktop.
Yes, anecdotal, but I’m running 3 PCs on Pop and loving it.
Edit: reading the article, and graph, it also looks like the field is more crowded in general. Also, would be good to see total installs over time, not just %.
I’m running Pop on my living room pc and it’s fine, looking forward to Cosmic when it arrives. Also have Linux Mint cinnamon on my bedroom pc. Been thinking of going back to Arch, but i’m lazy so i’ll stick with what i have unless i get annoyed enough to switch.
These days I’m most interested in Endeavour and Garuda, mostly as gateways into the Arch world without the headaches. Endeavour seems more mature so that’ll be my next install.
I’m giving up on Manjaro since it seems to lag and have odd discrepancies with Arch/AUR.
Going further back I liked Mint and SuSE and even Ubuntu, but the lack of gaming focus has driven me to other distros.
I’m on Manjaro since 5 years and don’t have any lags or “odd discrepancies” with the AUR (AMD setup, xanmod kernel). The general antipathy towards Manjaro on is not justified IMHO.
Love both of those distros, Endeavour is committed (their philosophy) to no GUI, only CLI commands, so keep that in mind. Garuda Gaming edition is the best gaming distro out there imo, handy GUI to configure everything, great privacy controls/browser. Manjaro should never be used, they hold back packages for “testing” which goes against Arch in general and can break AUR packages, thus your system. Another good Arch distro, minimal with optimized kernels, a privacy browser based on Firefox, is CachyOS. Those three I would recommend for Arch, besides Arch itself.
Endeavour is committed (their philosophy) to no GUI, only CLI commands, so keep that in mind.
That’s actually the first time I’ve seen that mentioned. It’s not highlighted on their website, in fact I had to go digging for this old 2019 article to get some insight on the philosophy there.
I’m not afraid of CLI so this is fine. I’m not an expert by any means but using it more will push me to learn. The updater frontend in Manjaro is kind of inconsistent anyway (e.g. it only shows Flatpaks sometimes) so I’ve often found myself using pacman in the terminal already.
Yeah, they don’t advertise it, but if you are on the forum, the devs let you know, especially if you need help with any GUI…“We don’t support…” Not saying the devs are bad, lovely people, but that is just their thing.
Cool, I appreciate the heads up and I think I’m ready for that. Cheers!
It’s not like you can’t install Endeavour and then install Majaro’s pamac anyway. Hell, I use Arch but still have pamac installed. Sometimes I just want a gui package manager.
How many AUR packages do you actually use? It’s mostly Electron “apps” anyway.
Barely any, honestly. I only vaguely recall one or two instances in the past year where I couldn’t find what I needed as a Flatpak or similar ready-to-go app. As a general user it’s pretty great honestly and I’m impressed at how easy it’s become.
I guess the Pop bubble has… Popped.
Sorry.
Ugh, fine, have an upvote.
Very interesting. My rig is still on Pop mostly because I’ve just never had issues with it. I use the Liquorix kernel for a little added spice.
On my laptop I’ve been playing with NixOS lately (used to run Arch btw). I love it so far, but haven’t explored it for gaming.
I’m guessing Arch’s dominance is largely due to SteamOS?
I used Pop on my main computer for almost a year before switching back to Mint last year. There were a lot of good things about it - for instance, it had the best compatibility out of the box with my hardware out of everything I tried. But I also saw some stability issues, and I personally dislike it’s aesthetic, and I’m not really interested in trying Cosmic. I still recommend it to people but it’s not for me.
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Some reeeeally weird trends here
- Mint is more popular than Fedora or the overhyped Nobara?
- Arch is so popular? Does that include SteamOS??
Pop has not received feature updates for years, because the dev team focuses on implementing Cosmic.
Given the overall progress of Linux Desktop environments, this might have led many users to switch away from Pop.
