All roads....

Originally, this was going to be a post about the fun I have been having with my two Raspberry Pis, but now I have another ramble on my mind!

Linux distros.....

So, I was looking today at Distrowatch (a website which claims to show the popularity of various distros - but I know it can be manipulated (legally) by a distro asking its users to do certain things!)

Anyway, this is tied in to the (what seems to be certain) demise of my old distro, Yoper (and my later distro PCLinuxOS).

If you look at the top distros based on page rankings, Yoper has vanished (as indeed it is now dead, then I expected this). However, other distros seem to be limping along, dispite no updates for a long time (check out Mandriva for example, whose last (official, stable) release was August 2011 - yet they are still there at number 69!)

A look at the top few suggests that Mint is the most popular distro - and has been for some time.
Presumably this is because the Ubuntu family split their vote with the various variants they have? I personally use Xubuntu for many of my machines (although I am a PCLinuxOS XFCE fan myself).

Some of the choices are really odd - several of the Linux distros in the top 100 are either dead or pretty much so! Others are old, specialist distros which are ancient too!

I have never been a fan of Distrowatch - it is very easy to manipulate the results and doesn't reflect what I see on users machines in general..

From my own experience, the top distros are all Debian based. So the -buntu family, Mint and indeed the original Debian itself.

Amusing to see dear old Puppy still hovering around the top 10 - and Knoppix still in the top 60 (and Knoppix is quite aged now!)

I am downloading the latest live version of my favourite current distro - PCLinuxOS at the moment. Sadly their XFCE version is currently sleeping, but the KDE variant is updated and this is what I am grabbing for various testings. I prefer the XFCE desktop for my machines, but still prefer their KDE version to Ubuntu for example! (I use Xubuntu currently on most of my machines, but not all!)