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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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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.
Nobara is sooo hyped. It is not a secure Distro. They literally
I recommend to use bazzite.gg if you want Gaming. They do all the Nobara fixes but
Panic! At the Disco
i think the high arch use is mostly steam deck users running steamos.
Pop is stagnant while they work on Cosmic. I'm one of the people who left because of that.
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.
An interesting trend graph of the most used distros for gaming and their adoption by users over time.
Yeah, the article mentions it in the first few sentences, but OP sure did bury the lede.
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.
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!
It's not like you can't install Endeavour and then install Majaro's pamac anyway. Hell, I use Arch but still have pamac installed. Sometimes I just want a gui package manager.
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.
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.
Pop os is incredibly ancient. I imagine it will explode in popularly when Cosmic is released and the distro gets a refresh.
I guess the Pop bubble has... Popped.
Sorry.
Ugh, fine, have an upvote.
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.
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!
I'm guessing Arch's dominance is largely due to SteamOS?
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 %.
Pop has not received feature updates for years, because the dev team focuses on implementing Cosmic.
Given the overall progress of Linux Desktop environments, this might have led many users to switch away from Pop.
Very interesting. My rig is still on Pop mostly because I've just never had issues with it. I use the Liquorix kernel for a little added spice.
On my laptop I've been playing with NixOS lately (used to run Arch btw). I love it so far, but haven't explored it for gaming.
Some reeeeally weird trends here