Open data

Everything behind the site, free to reuse under CC BY 4.0. Credit us and link back.

Dataset version 2.0.0 · rebuilt after every ingest.

Files

• distros.json Facts, GitHub activity and community ratings for all 553 distros, with version, licence and sources.
• distros.csv The same table as CSV.
• notes.json Our editorial data: who each distro suits, pros and cons, and telemetry facts with sources.
• market-share.csv Desktop OS market share by month (StatCounter).

How to credit

Use this line wherever you show the data, with a link to linuxstatistics.com:

Data: LinuxStatistics (linuxstatistics.com), CC BY 4.0

Fields that come from other sources keep their own terms and credits:

• StatCounter Global Stats
• GitHub
• Wikidata (CC0; base, first release, website and status where our curated list has no value)

API (v1)

A read-only JSON API with the same data, open to any website (CORS), cached for 5 minutes, limited to 120 requests a minute per IP. No key needed.

• GET https://linuxstatistics.com/api/v1/distros All distros with facts, ratings and GitHub stats.
• GET https://linuxstatistics.com/api/v1/distros/<slug> One distro with details and GitHub star history. Old slugs redirect to the current one.
• GET https://linuxstatistics.com/api/v1/market-share?region=global Desktop OS market share by month.

Every response carries license and credit fields. Fields are only removed or renamed in a new version (/api/v2/); new fields can appear at any time.

Things to know

• Rankings aren't in the open data yet. They'll be added once our own ranking method is published.
• Community ratings are shown as averages and counts only; individual ratings and reviews aren't published.
• Pros, cons and telemetry notes are our editorial work, checked against each project's documentation. Corrections welcome via the suggestion form.
• Field names only change in a new major version. Changes are listed below.

Changelog

• 2.0.0 (2026-11): rank and page-hit columns, rank-history.csv and rank badges removed; files sorted by name.
• 1.0.0 (2026-11): first release.

Code that builds these files is open source: GitHub (AGPL-3.0).