Welcome to this year's 22nd issue of DistroWatch Weekly! This week we are thrilled to present you with a special milestone edition of DistroWatch Weekly. As I write this, DistroWatch is celebrating its 25th anniversary! Not many websites get to survive for a quarter of a century and we're thrilled our readers continue to come along for the experience. Later in this Weekly we share some thoughts on our publication turning 25 years old and provide some statistics about our little corner of the Internet.
DistroWatch is a website that provides news, distribution pages hit rankings, and other general information about various Linux distributions as well as other free software/open source Unix-like operating systems. It now contains information on several hundred distributions and a few hundred distributions labeled as active.
How many of our community use Distrowatch? Do you view it regularly, daily, occassionally, or ask "Is Distrowatch still going...?".
(Score: 3, Funny) by KritonK on Thursday June 04, @07:41AM (9 children)
Um, what is Distrowatch?
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday June 04, @07:57AM (7 children)
To be honest, it came along after I had chosen a favourite distro (Slackware) and had been exposed to other Unixes and unix-like OSes (Solaris, Red Hat, Debian, Mandrake (remember that?), CentOS, FreeBSD) so I never really looked at it.
By then we were into an era of "reviews" of all the new distros which were basically reviews of the installers.
I suppose the interesting ones were things like Gentoo, Arch and Ubuntu, because they all were quite different in design and target audience. There was an explosion in the number of distros which were basically ${FOO} with a different GUI. And that raises the question, why do you need a different distro just to get a different window manager/desktop environment. There was a time when you got GNOME and KDE in the same distro plus XFCE and all sorts of stand-alone window managers. We live in times where to change the desktop you need to install a different OS. It's back to the closed-source/proprietary/commercial OS way of doing things.
And get off my lawn etc.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Unixnut on Thursday June 04, @10:40AM (3 children)
I used to to go to it for news and ideas for trying out new distros. For example I discovered damn small linux [distrowatch.com] when I specifically looked for a lightweight live-CD type distro (as Knoppix got a bit too bloated/slow for my liking) and GeexBox [distrowatch.com], which was a lightweight mplayer based media centre (this was before projects like Kodi/XBMC, when XBMC was brand new and still only ran on the Xbox).
So the site had its uses, but I can't say I've used it in the last 15 years at least. Thing is in the early 00's when Linux was new and rapidly growing, there was a new distro being launched almost every other week. Everyone was hacking on Linux for specific use cases. Everyone wanted to be a "Linux Expert", and (in the USA at least) everyone was vying to be the next RedHat and get VC funding and become successful.
So distrowatch was useful as a central point to keep track of all the goings on with distro's. However things have changed now. Linux has become mature and corporate. There are only really two main families that came out of the 00's melee, and that is RPM based and DEB based distro's, parents being RedHat and Debian respectively.
Pretty much all the mainstream variants are based on one of those two, and with SystemD making everything the same under the hood, really the only choice between them now is the colour/branding/GUI of your distro, and what package format you prefer.
The interesting stuff (and investment money) has moved up the chain, from the distro to the applications, to the "cloud", and now to AI doing all the stuff for you with a magic prompt. The distro now is just a necessary layer to run the interesting stuff on top of, you don't want to experiment with it unless you absolutely have to.
Saying that, I'm surprised and pleased to see distrowatch is still existing and that they still keep the old distro's about. In some ways its like a museum of that early Linux period when there was so much variety and choice of Linux distro's, it is an archive of a very important period in Linux (and open source) growth into mainstream acceptance.
Really the main use for it nowadays is if you have a real niche usage of Linux where the best option it to roll your own distro. In which case it is wise to check distrowatch to if somebody has already done something similar so you don't have to completely re-invent the wheel, and if you actively have an interest in Linux distro's and want to keep up to date on new distro's that are being launched.
(Score: 2, Informative) by shrewdsheep on Thursday June 04, @12:00PM (2 children)
Well, SuSE is independent, although they adopted the rpm format which was already established by the time. I consider those the big three: SuSE/RedHat/Debian. Recently, Arch has come to prominence as another independent distribution. I agree, the rest is thin layers over those.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Thursday June 04, @05:12PM (1 child)
Is SuSE still used anywhere though? I remember it was quite large back in the early 00's, and some governments said they would use it.
In fact after faltering with getting Redhat installed and working properly, I went to SuSE ( after a brief affair with Lindows(*) ). As it was the first Linux OS I used on the desktop long term I have fond memories of SuSE (I also really liked the mascot!). I guess it is independent, but the fact it uses RPM means I tend to lump it into the "Redhat derivative" bucket, even if it does not actually track RH's development upstream.
As for Arch, I have to agree with you there, it has become one of the large "parent" distros out there, although I've not seen it used by anyone except enthusiasts/hobbyists. Almost all commercial use is Debian/RH. Even HPC setups have tended towards RH or Debian. The only non duopoly distro I have seen in (increasing) commercial use is NixOS, for its unique packaging system and configuration method.
(*) Anyone remember Lindows? First proper non technical end-user friendly Linux with built in "wine" configured and integrated into the GUI so you could run Windows apps on it automatically.
I bought it from the local student market and installed it. Really easy to use, quick to set up and had their own "app store" type system for easy package installation and management. Unfortunately Microsoft threw lawyers at them [wikipedia.org] until they finally settled and changed their name. However the years and money spent fighting means they could not concentrate on their OS offering and eventually vanished from the market.
(Score: 4, Informative) by KritonK on Friday June 05, @04:39AM
If you are asking whether there are people who are using it, there most certainly are. I had started with the old Red Hat Linux distribution, switched to Fedora, when it came out, as there was an upgrade path from Red Hat Linux, then kept upgrading until 2017, when I started looking for another distribution, as KDE had become unstable on Fedora. I wanted something that was leading edge, like Fedora, so that switching wouldn't seem like a downgrade, preferably be rpm-based, for familiarity, and, of course, should be stable. OpenSUSE Tumbleweed ticked all the boxes: it is a rolling distro, so it is even more leading edge than Fedora, it is RPM-based, though it uses a different package manager (zypper insyead of yum/dnf), and thanks to OpenSUSE's testing procedures, it is rock solid. I have been happily using it for nine years, and see no reason to switch to anything else.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Sourcery42 on Thursday June 04, @01:47PM
>Mandrake (remember that?)
Mandrake was essentially my entry point. I messed with some other distros and obscure stuff like BeOS back then, but Mandrake is the only distro that stuck enough I recall it by name. I used it up until the name change and merger with Conectiva. Distrowatch was part of my migration Mandrake -> PCLinuxOS -> Mint -> Arch based every step of the way. Every so often my OS of choice would lose its way or give me some sort of trouble. Then I'd use distrowatch to track down some new isos for testing. Certainly not an everyday thing, but once every five years or so I check in at distrowatch.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Thursday June 04, @07:09PM (1 child)
Mandrake was so cool, as was Corel linux (remember THAT?)
I started with Redhat (5-6...) then Mandrake (5.0?) then Debian...blah blah...
I used Distrowatch to keep up with new distros and hopped like a kangaroo (downloading on dial-up... ugh, until i discovered 'wget -c'!!!
Now, no time. I look at distrowatch occasionally now, but not in depth. Mostly use it to keep an eye on the new/independent distros (Void, etc). Looking at everything cool...
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 2) by turgid on Thursday June 04, @07:28PM
Distrowatch is very useful, but I find personally I don't look at it much. It does a valuable job.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by HyperQuantum on Thursday June 04, @10:53PM
No, no...
Why is Distrowatch?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by canopic jug on Thursday June 04, @03:03PM
How many of our community use Distrowatch?
It's been useful enough from time to time, sometimes very useful in looking up odd details about a distro or two. Between that and it's staying power, 25 years is a long time, I decided last year to be donating a small monthly donation to keep them going. I can't spend all my money that way but I try to spread some discretionary spending around to projects which have been noteworthy and helpful. There are some, like dnsmasq, which are, however, blocked by Paypal which would be sinking way to low to use it and risk losing the money at either end of the transaction.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by corey on Friday June 05, @11:45AM (1 child)
(Score: 2) by corey on Friday June 05, @11:50AM