An interesting trend graph of the most diffused distros and their adoption by users over time.
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.
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
Panic! At the Disco
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=nwD88hxOykk
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Who puts an exclamation mark in their name? Aside from Yahoo! I suppose.
And Westward Ho!
Pop is stagnant while they work on Cosmic. I’m one of the people who left because of that.
I am still actively maintaining Pop!_OS. COSMIC has not changed that aspect of my job. Just within the last week I packaged Linux 6.6.8, Mesa 23.3.2, Just 1.22, Rust 1.75.0, and updated Popsicle’s dependencies to fix a bindgen build error with recent versions of Clang. We have a systemd update that was packaged today, and I’ll be doing another linux-firmware backport soon. So I don’t understand why you’d think it is stagnant. We’re even shipping Pipewire 1.0.0 by default, which Ubuntu hasn’t yet done in the latest version. People usually complain that we update too often.
Stagnant was probably the wrong choice of word. Perhaps “stable” (in the Debian sense) would be more apt, and that isn’t for everybody. I think you will see a HUGE influx once Cosmic launches.
It’s not stable in the Debian sense. We’ve always had rolling release updates for the system base; and people often complain about regressions in Linux, Pipewire, Mesa, and NVIDIA updates. I get them packaged shortly after they’re released. As long as they pass QA tests in the System76 hardware lab, they get released within a week.
Well, there must still be a reason that people are going to other distros… I don’t think Pop has any inherent problems (unlike Manjaro for example) so perhaps the average user (counting myself in there) simply considers those under-the-hood changes less appealing than new GUI stuff, especially when the demographic is gamers. Things like Cosmic’s improved tiling and the built-in theming support will be a major attraction, I think.
You are misunderstanding the data. It is not the number of users, but a percent of posts to ProtonDB, which only applies to PC gamers. There can be a disproportionately larger number of reports from those who need to spend time tweaking their system as opposed to using it, or that are particularly vocal about sharing their tweaks.
The total number of users playing games on Linux is rising each year. Pop!_OS was the first OS that a lot of people tried a few years ago, and so you’ll see a lot more diversity in choice now. People who are new to Linux, yet particularly heavily invested in it, tend to like to try out a lot of different distributions in the following years.
What you said makes sense. It is like that metaphor with the planes and bullet holes you know?
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.
There are new versions released every two or three weeks. I’m about to release Linux 6.6.8 with Mesa 23.3.2. We have Pipewire 1.0.0 and NVIDIA 545. ISOs are regularly rebuilt with our latest updates.
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.
Pop!_OS has released 37 versions based on Ubuntu Jammy, though. Soon to be 38.
I guess it depends how one defines “update” versus “version”. Again, please don’t take what I’m saying as criticism of what you guys are doing, because PopOS is great — I just happen to have a personality better suited to rolling-release distros. Pop is what I usually recommend to first-time Linux users though.
I’m defining it the same way that Mint and Ubuntu is here. Which is when they release a new version of their ISO. We are currently on 22.04.37. Release date January of 2024. There are substantial changes since the first ISO build of 22.04
An interesting trend graph of the most used distros for gaming and their adoption by users over time.
Yeah, I love me some Flatpak distro ;-)
On the serious note, I’m sad openSUSE is so low. Tumbleweed’s great distro!
I used to use Tubleweed, but I tested Fedora Silverblue to check out what the immutability is all about and never returned. I think I will switch to OpenSuse Aeon, but for now it does not support Full Disk Encryption which is a deal breaker for me.
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 was just looking at this graph and thinking of posting it here… thanks for saving me the trouble! I only had a couple of thoughts (and accepting the data comes only from ProtonDB and I’m a gamer so this makes the data especially interesting): it’s nice to see Arch and Arch-based distros doing so well; if you add them together they’re quite a large block, and I’m also not sad about Ubuntu’s falling share (it’s become very corporate - at least that’s my feeling, I don’t follow such stuff very closely). Oh, and I just tried out Nobara and was very impressed with it as a gaming distro (I got better FPS playing Warframe than I did on Windows 11) and it’s good to see that getting a small but growing share.
Pop os is incredibly ancient. I imagine it will explode in popularly when Cosmic is released and the distro gets a refresh.
2022 was only a year and a half ago, and we ship the latest Linux kernel, firmware, Mesa libraries, NVIDIA drivers and libraries, Pipewire/Wireplumber, ZFS, Firefox, Alacritty, Lutris, Steam, and Rust. Since when did we start considering that to be “incredibly ancient”? The next LTS release is not yet available to base Pop!_OS upon, but we ship newer kernels and drivers than the latest version of Ubuntu.
There are people for whom 2 weeks is too old, don’t mind them.
Ironically it’s also this type of user that tends to get in over their head with rolling bleeding distros and destroy their system. 😄
I tend to think about it as the “wild” years, it’s a time in a PC enthusiast’s life when they want to experiment with lots of stuff and only the most fresh will do. But there are lots of people who appreciate a bit of stability more.
Yeah ignore the hate. I really don’t get what that other poster could possibly be missing. LTS versions are where it’s at anyway. I’ve been loving pop and am looking forward to cosmic (when it’s ready). Like you say with all the kernel and libraries updated it’s totally fine to stay on the LTS.
Pop is awesome!
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.
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.
I guess the Pop bubble has… Popped.
Sorry.
Makes sense to me. I’m a Pop! user since 22.04 and the wait is painful, although the blog posts definitely help a bit. Currently I have no problems but if something breaks I’ll try out Nobara I guess. My /home is already partitioned so I can make that hop with minimal loss.
Also switched distros from pop. I’ve had more success with Ultramarine than with Nobara on my nvidia-powered laptop. Check it out if Nobara gives you problems.
I’m running full AMD on a desktop, I don’t foresee any problems here. Hopefully your advice helps someone though!
After the bug with pop_os that happened to Linus I stopped using it. I’d like reliable system and clearly the pop_os team doesn’t know how to package their software if a dependency error that bad happens
They commented on their video that it was their fault. There was never a packaging issue. The issue was that we pushed a systemd source package update to Launchpad, which silently didn’t build or publish the 32-bit systemd library packages, because Ubuntu had systemd on a blacklist for 32-bit package builds. We noticed this minutes after packages were published, and had it fixed within an hour later.
This didn’t actually affect any systems in the wild because apt held back the update until we had worked around the restriction on Launchpad (there was an invisible ceiling to the package version number). They were only affected during that time period because they manually entered that sentence from the prompt in a terminal. We stopped using Launchpad with 21.10, so all packages released since then are the same packages that are built and tested by our packaging server, and used by our QA team internally.
The drama and reputational damage that LTT caused was unnecessary. Especially given that they uploaded this video a week later, and never attempted to reach out. They still have yet to properly edit the video.
