| Linux Distributions - Facts and Figures |
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| Introduction |
A Linux distribution is like a religion.
If you've ever tried to suggest to another person that his or her choice of a distro might not be the best, then you know what I mean.
Even if you haven't, you have probably come across a "distribution opinion war" on one of the mailing lists or public forums.
But that's OK. We should be passionate about things we love, even if it's just a mass of programming code.
What follows are facts and figures about Linux distributions.
Personal opinions may vary, but facts are a lot more difficult to dispute...
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| Introduction: explanations and assumptions |
Despite its appearance, DistroWatch is not an exhaustive list of Linux distributions.
Due to lack of time and other priorities, the following categories are presently excluded from these pages:
- floppy-based distribution,
- embedded distributions (e.g. Midori Linux),
- distributions running from Windows partitions (e.g. Phat Linux, Topologi Linux).
If you find any inaccuracies, please report them.
I am still working on some scripts to keep this page constantly up-to-date so that it is a useful resource and reference.
Also, if you have any further ideas for analysing other aspects of Linux distributions, I'd be happy to hear them and consider them for inclusion.
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| Where is your distribution made? |
Most visitors won't be surprised to see that nearly a quarter of all distribution was initiated in the USA, while Germany, Canada, France and Japan are also very active countries.
A note on Debian - although the idea came from the USA, the distribution has become a truly global project with less than half of the Debian developers located in the United States. Therefore Debian, together with some other distributions, has therefore been placed into the Global category.
Where is your distribution made...
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| How independent is your distribution? |
There are many distributions out there.
The number of distributions in this site's database is quite impressive -- until you realise that the majority of them is nothing but modified versions of Red Hat/Fedora or Debian.
In some cases these modified distributions can be justified; a distribution offering a better localisation support for a language-specific market is a good example.
Some distributions, such as Mandrake, Conectiva and PLD were originally based on Red Hat, although they have since developed into distributions in their own rights and there are now other distributions based on them.
As for SUSE, a reader has pointed out that it was originally based on a German distribution called Jurix, which is no longer maintained.
How independent is your distribution...
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| How popular is your distribution? |
The Page Hit Ranking statistics have attracted plenty of attention and feedback.
Originally, each distribution-specific page was pure HTML with a third-party counter at the bottom to monitor interest of visitors. Later the pages were transformed into plain text files with PHP generating all the HTML code, but the original counter remained unchanged. In May 2004 the site switched from publicly viewable third-party counters to internal counters. This was prompted by a continuous abuse of the counters by a handful of undisciplined individuals who had confused DistroWatch with a voting station. The counters are no longer displayed on the individual distributions pages, but all visits (on the main site, as well as on mirrors) are logged. Only one hit per IP address per day is counted.
The figures in the third column of each table represent the average number of hits per day for the specified period. The tables are updated daily at around 40 minutes past midnight GMT.
How popular is your distribution... (updated daily)
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| How free is your distribution? |
This has proved the most controversial part of this page.
The initial idea was to show which products are free in both senses of the word - i.e. freely available for download and their own work freely available under GPL.
The first part is easy. A distribution can either be downloaded or not. The second part is much harder.
There are distributions that have completely open development trees at any time and anybody can peek inside and see what is happening.
Then there are distributions that don't provide access to their development branch, don't provide the source code of their releases and don't release any of their own work under GPL, but still claim to be compliant with GPL.
I am not a lawyer and I have no interest in contesting these claims.
Having said that, I don't want to remove this section because many people have written to say that they find this part useful.
It gives an indication about the availability of a distribution without having to hunt around the web sites just to find out that a distribution cannot be downloaded.
The table that follows lists how free (as in beer) a distribution is on a scale from 1 to 4, with 1 being the most available without having to reach for the wallet and 4 indicating that those distributions do not provide any forms of free downloads.
As for the distribution's GPL compliance and their respect for freedom as in speech, you are on your own...
How free is your distribution...
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| What is your distribution's package management? |
Regular DistroWatch visitors will know that I am no friend of the RPM package manager, yet the truth is that it remains the most popular tool for managing your software.
Many RPM-based distributions are now using one of the RPM ports of Debian's APT tool, which are known under various names, but for the sake of simplicity I'll refer to them as APT-RPM.
Debian's DEB and Slackware's TGZ (and its derivatives) are also widely used.
Most source-based distributions don't offer pre-compiled binary packages so the only way to install the software is to compile it directly from source code.
A couple of more unusual package managers were also invented. The best-known is probably the (now dormant) Stampede's SLP, which had a few interesting features, but JBLinux also developed its own package manager.
I am not sure about UHU - is it just a Debian packager with a different name?
What is your distribution's package management...
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| Where are the DistroWatch visitors from? |
This section presents some statistics about the origin of visitors browsing
these pages. The tracking system is based on GPL-ed
GeoIP package
from MaxMind whose IP address-to-country database is updated monthly and who claim a 97%
accuracy rate (and that's why we are 97% certain that you are visiting us from United States. The purpose is to find out the popularity of
Linux distributions in different countries, based on the number of hits on each of
the distribution-specific page on this site. The data collection began on 27 November 2002.
There are three ways to look at the data depending on your selection in the "Chart Display Options"
section. If you select a country from the drop-down box on the right,
the resulting table will rank distributions according to the
number of page hits by visitors from that particular country. If you select a
distribution from drop-down text box on the left, the table will list the ranking of countries,
visitors of which browsed that particular distribution's page most frequently. In the latter case,
you can also relate the data to the country's population by ticking the "PER CAPITA" checkbox
(the resulting data in fact represent number of visits divided by one million inhabitants).
The data are updated once a day, at midnight GMT.
Where are the DistroWatch visitors from... (temporarily unavailable while the page is being recoded)
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| Alexa Certified Site Stats |
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| Conclusion: warning and request |
Dealing with a large amount of data is always error-prone.
If you've found any errors or inaccuracies, rest assured that they were not intentional.
Most importantly, please report them.
Suggestions for future updates of this page are also welcome. Thank you.
Back to the top...
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| Copyright Notice |
Copyright (C) 2002 Ladislav Bodnar
Verbatim copying and distribution of this article is permitted in any medium, provided this copyright notice is preserved.
First published on 10 October 2002.
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