Distrowatch is the most famous database for Linux/Unix-like operating systems and distributions out there. It is indeed a very good and helpful site.
However, in a lot of discussions, people rush to assume that the counters they provide in their sidebar about “Page hit ranking” are equal to the popularity or the adoption of that distribution.
“This is the #1 most famous Linux distribution on Distrowatch, it has to be good”. - famous last words.
Which is entirely wrong.
That counter is literally called “page hit ranking”. That is, it simply counts the number of times each Linux distribution’s page was visited on their site in the last 6 months.
The counter increases each time a visitor simply opens that page. And the more there is news about that distribution and its new releases on the main page of Distrowatch, the more times it will be visited, of course.
It clearly has nothing related to the real-world userbase of that Linux distribution.
You will see distributions like MX Linux, EndeavourOS, Mint and Manjaro are occupying the #1, #2, #3 and #4’th places respectively, but it would be insane to consider this a real ranking of how popular each of these distributions is.
They are not guilty of this, of course; they themselves explain how their ranking works, and that it is not reflective of real-world user adoption. But sadly, a lot of new and excited Linux users may simply rush to conclusions and start using it for stuff other than what it was created for.
We have written about this in the past in detail, so you can keep reading our post if you would like to understand more about this topic:
https://fosspost.org/distrowatch-not-measure-for-distributions-popularity/
However, this keeps the door open for an important question: What could be a correct, scientific way to measure how popular each Linux distribution is? We are yet to find a suitable method for this, and no one has moved forward to find one either.
Consider it an open discussion question for this week!
Last Week Open Source News
We follow open source news from all over the Internet so you don’t have to.
ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, is investing in making an open source replacement for UEFI (aka secure boot environment). While this is an unexpected move from the Chinese giant, it is definitely better than nothing.
Pipewire 0.6.7 was released with many bug fixes, especially for Bluetooth. For those who don’t know, Pipewire is an audio server that seeks to be a replacement for the legacy PulseAudio software. Some modern distributions like Fedora 37 and Ubuntu 22.10 use it by default.
“Flathub in 2023” is a detailed report about the activity of Flathub, the most common Flatpak repository, and its future in the upcoming years. The most important bits are: “Flathub is going strong: we offer 2,000 apps from over 1,500 collaborators on GitHub. We’re averaging 700,000 app downloads a day, with 898 million HTTP requests totalling 88.3 TB served by our CDN each day”.
Interesting Stuff from the Web
These discussions and articles might be interesting for you, all related to either Linux or open source software:
“Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF” is an interesting read about the story of an open source PDF reader for Windows. The software developer explains why he created it, and what are some important core decisions he made along the way over the period of 15 years.
“The Ultimate Linux ARM64 Workstation” is an interesting story about the experience of using Linux on Apple Silicon (M1 Ultra). The author says that everything works flawlessly, thanks to the work of Asahi Linux.
Hope you liked our newsletter! Don’t forget to share and pledge your support.
I wrote DistroWatch with the suggestion that the kernel could have an applet in it that each time it is installed would send data to some on-line database then the applet would self destruct or be removed during the cleanup after installation. Mr Smith wrote back and expressed the opinion that this would be an infringement on the users rights [or something to that effect]. The code, or applet, would only send a ping, or something else, that would be received and the database would count it.
It could also be interesting to know additional information such as CPU. I would not mind letting the Linux database know information on what type of computer I have and even my general location. I would not consider such information sharing to be an infringement on my privacy. Such information might reveal that Linux share of the total OS market is much higher than assumed.
I think that the DistroWatch team does an outstanding job. I notice that some new distros don’t get added to the DistroWatch website. It would be good if all new created distros folks had a organization that they could register their product.