An interesting trend graph of the most diffused distros 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.
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.
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'm on Manjaro since 5 years and don't have any lags or "odd discrepancies" with the AUR (AMD setup, xanmod kernel). The general antipathy towards Manjaro on is not justified IMHO.
Love both of those distros, Endeavour is committed (their philosophy) to no GUI, only CLI commands, so keep that in mind. Garuda Gaming edition is the best gaming distro out there imo, handy GUI to configure everything, great privacy controls/browser. Manjaro should never be used, they hold back packages for "testing" which goes against Arch in general and can break AUR packages, thus your system. Another good Arch distro, minimal with optimized kernels, a privacy browser based on Firefox, is CachyOS. Those three I would recommend for Arch, besides Arch itself.
Endeavour is committed (their philosophy) to no GUI, only CLI commands, so keep that in mind.
That's actually the first time I've seen that mentioned. It's not highlighted on their website, in fact I had to go digging for this old 2019 article to get some insight on the philosophy there.
https://discovery.endeavouros.com/articles/does-endeavouros-frown-upon-gui-solutions-for-pacman/2019/11/
I'm not afraid of CLI so this is fine. I'm not an expert by any means but using it more will push me to learn. The updater frontend in Manjaro is kind of inconsistent anyway (e.g. it only shows Flatpaks sometimes) so I've often found myself using pacman in the terminal already.
Yeah, they don't advertise it, but if you are on the forum, the devs let you know, especially if you need help with any GUI..."We don't support...." Not saying the devs are bad, lovely people, but that is just their thing.
Cool, I appreciate the heads up and I think I'm ready for that. Cheers!
How many AUR packages do you actually use? It's mostly Electron "apps" anyway.
Barely any, honestly. I only vaguely recall one or two instances in the past year where I couldn't find what I needed as a Flatpak or similar ready-to-go app. As a general user it's pretty great honestly and I'm impressed at how easy it's become.
An interesting trend graph of the most used distros for gaming and their adoption by users over time.
It's probably best to take this whole graph with a grain of salt. There's already some questionable relationships in it, like for every 4th Manjaro user coming in a Gentoo user, which I find hard to believe to say the list.
Second, it's hard to say Pop exclamation mark underscore OS is on the decline when the whole field just looks more diversified in general. Sure the hype around gaming distros from the lockdowns seems to have cooled down a bit, but there isn't any distro that just disappeared. On the contrary, it seems to have gotten just more.
As already mentioned, we can expect another hype again when Cosmic DE launches.PopOS is what got me into Linux, and the only one that worked "out of the the box" for the handful of things I wanted, esp remote desktop.
Yes, anecdotal, but I'm running 3 PCs on Pop and loving it.
Edit: reading the article, and graph, it also looks like the field is more crowded in general. Also, would be good to see total installs over time, not just %.
