linuxstats
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About LinuxStatistics

A clear, honest chart of Linux distributions: which ones people are looking at, which are climbing, and which one might suit you.

What we do

We track 553 Linux distributions. Each has a page with its ranking, how that ranking has moved, who it suits, its pros and trade-offs, and whether the system sends any usage data. You can compare any two side by side, or answer a few questions on Which distro? to get three suggestions with reasons.

Where the numbers come from

  • Popularity: our composite index. One of its inputs is DistroWatch's page-hit ranking. Everything in it measures interest, not installs.
  • Desktop share: StatCounter Global Stats, monthly, worldwide.
  • Development activity: public GitHub repositories (stars, commits).
  • Distro facts: base distribution, first release, website and status from Wikidata (CC0), checked against our own curated list where the two disagree.
  • Release dates and support: current release, release date and end of support from endoflife.date (CC BY-SA 4.0), for the distros it tracks.
  • Interest index: daily views of each distro's English Wikipedia article, from the Wikimedia REST API.
  • Community scores: ratings from signed-in visitors. How scores work.
  • Editorial notes: "Pick if", pros and cons and telemetry details are written by us from each project's own documentation, with sources linked.

Data refreshes automatically: DistroWatch daily; GitHub, Wikidata and endoflife.date weekly; StatCounter and Wikipedia monthly. If a source fails, we keep the last good data rather than show broken numbers. The fetcher identifies itself as linux-statistics-bot; see about our crawler.

How we rank distros

No single website should decide the chart, so the ranking is a composite index built from several interest signals. Each signal ranks the distros it covers; a distro's score for that signal is its position scaled from 1 (first) down toward 0 (last). A distro a signal doesn't cover scores 0 for it. The weighted sum is ranked. Current weights:

  • 50% daily views of the distro's English Wikipedia article over the last 12 months.
  • 30% DistroWatch's 12-month page-hit rank, a credited input while our own signals grow.
  • 10% GitHub stars on the distro's main repository, for distros that have one.
  • 10% views of the distro's page on this site over the last 90 days.

The weights live in one place in the source code and change only in a reviewed commit. All of these measure attention, not installs; nobody has install numbers for Linux. The index is rebuilt monthly. "Rising" uses the same inputs over the last month.

Independence

Rankings, scores and editorial notes are never for sale. Sponsors and affiliate links pay for hosting; they don't change where a distro ranks or what we say about it. Paid placements are always labelled. See Sponsors and our terms and community rules.

Open source

The whole site is open source under the AGPL-3.0 licence. You can read how every number is calculated, report a mistake or suggest a change on GitHub.

Who runs it

LinuxStatistics is run by Chris Hartman in the United States.

Contact