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by still_grokking 1108 days ago

Half the Linux distris? I've once counted on Distrowatch. When you go by number of distris there it's more like 80% are Debian based.

If you go also by how much those distris are used it's even like 9x% of the stuff running out there is Debian based.

There are almost no independent distris. You have Arch, you have SUSE, you have RedHat and a few clones, you have Gentoo. But more or less everything else is Debian based.

2 comments

mongol 1108 days ago

Do I get it right that you mean > 90 percent of distro use is Debian-based? Because that can hardly be the case

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tuukkah 1108 days ago

Ubuntu and its derivatives are included.

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mongol 1107 days ago

Yes. But Red Hat, Fedora, openSUSE, SLE, Arch, Alpine, Slackware, Gentoo, NixOS are not. I have a hard time to think these represent less than 10 percent all together

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guerrilla 1108 days ago

Is Ubuntu still Debian based? What's the criterion for that anyway? Just using debs?

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chungy 1108 days ago

Ubuntu releases are, effectively, snapshots of Debian sid every 6 months. That's a pretty strong basis.

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tuukkah 1108 days ago

I wouldn't call Ubuntu a flavor of Debian as they have so big differences, but ultimately it's still mostly Debian. You can see a numerical comparison of packages here: http://qa.ubuntuwire.com/mdt/all.html

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eikenberry 1108 days ago

Yes, Ubuntu is still Debian based with just a little added on top.

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gwhl 1108 days ago

And Slackware!

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still_grokking 1108 days ago

There are of course some niche distris that aren't based on the "big ones".

But I'm not sure Slackware is still at this point relevant enough to be named in a row with the others I've mentioned.

Of course the sampling was subjective, and I didn't intended to marginalize any not mentioned distris. I just thought the others are too niche to be included in such kind of pick.

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igetspam 1107 days ago

I want to downvote you for sentimental reasons. I won't but I want to.

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still_grokking 1107 days ago

Do it, and tell the world how I mistreated all kinds of interesting (but small) projects, if it makes you feel better. :-D

Here a list of almost all the OS distris I've left out:

https://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=All&category=All&o...

Besides mentioning Slackware for historical reasons I should have also mentioned NixOS, which I forgot.

The former was the first Linux distri, the later gained some respectable user-base in the last years, I think.

Ah, and there is also Alpine which you can see sometimes here and there. (People using it in containers for reasons I've never understood as that's imho a recipe for trouble.)

But if you look at the rest of the list most of the stuff is really obscure. (I've tried some Solaris derivatives and Exherbo in the past but didn't even heard of all the other names.)

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nortonham 1106 days ago

why is using alpine for containers a recipe for trouble?

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still_grokking 1105 days ago

TL;DR: It's slow and has all kinds of issues. If all you want is small containers use Distroless.

Musl is still a kind of experiment. I would not recommend running experiments in production…

Just a few random links:

https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/benchmarking-debian-vs-alpine...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28312433

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/musl-libc-alpines-greatest-we...

https://martinheinz.dev/blog/92