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GNU/Linux Distribution Timeline
- sillysaurus3 13y agoI wish the dots were scaled by some metric indicating popularity. Such a metric is hard to come up with. Maybe total number of commits. Way awesome though.
- tbirdz 13y agoPerhaps number of downloads? Number of mirrors?
- heinrich5991 13y agoYou already see some kind of popularity – just count the number of forks.
- koyote 13y agoBut would you say Slackware is more popular these days than OpenSuse? I think number of forks is not a very precise metric.
- sdfjkl 13y agoForks are also an indicator that people weren't happy with the origin.
- orkoden 13y agoIt kind of depends on the forks. Many are just a different set of default installed packages plus a new wallpaper.
- danford 13y agoOr that people were really happy with the origin.. That's like saying countries that based their "constitutions" off of another countries did it because they don't like that countries constitution. What's more likely is that they really like it but just wanted to tweak something.
- igravious 13y agoThe page hit count on http://distrowatch.com/ http://distrowatch.com/ is sometimes used as a popularity proxy. What do you reckon?
- Rovanion 13y agoThat it's horrible as a popularity index and should never be used as such. The number of visits is very low and the population which visits the site is very selective. Instead use data from highly popular sites like wikipedia: http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOperatingSystems.htm http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportOpera...
- hrrsn 13y agoI don't think that's really accurate enough either. For example that page says iOS 1 is the most popular version of the OS, way ahead of iOS 7.
- callesgg 13y agoCool :) Where does the source data come from?
- a1a 13y agoThe same one: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_T... Not able to find source though. Anyone? Edit: More info http://futurist.se/gldt/ http://futurist.se/gldt/, still no source though.
- claudius 13y agoThe tar.bz there has a CSV file which looks pretty sourcy to me.
- NAFV_P 13y agoI couldn't find kylin linux.
- dtech 13y agoThis is from 2012 and missing the (2012) part in the title...
- pwelch 13y agoAgreed. Two things that I know are out of date: No SteamOS (Based off Debian) Backtrack was rebuilt and is now Kali I'm sure there is other stuff.
- google-serf 13y agoThis is beautiful. I'd like posters for my walls. Does anyone else know of similar diagrams suitable for printing?
- ipedrazas 13y agoIt's a nice svg so I guess you couold turn it into a PDF with a converter. SVG to PDF in google?
- lamby 13y agoI maintain a specific timeline for Debian if anyone is interested: http://timeline.debian.net http://timeline.debian.net
- jojoo 13y agoThat's great. Made me go back to to my early debian days with Potato CDs from the bookstore and a translation of "Debian GNU/Linux: Guide to Installation and Usage". I Could'nt update to woody because it was too costly over the dialup line, so i bought the Woody CD set together with a Friend. Every time i had to install something i had to walk to his house and get the CDs, or pay lots of money (for me as a teenager at that time) to download the files. Maybe you could add another Frame with Versions of Popular Packages? I'm Thinking KDE, Gnome, GCC, mayor scripting Languages Browsers and Editors?
- lamby 13y ago> Maybe you could add another Frame with Versions of Popular Packages? I'm Thinking KDE, Gnome, GCC, mayor scripting Languages Browsers and Editors? That's interesting - to give more context to particular eras? I can certainly "place" myself in life when using GNOME 2.8 :)
- jojoo 13y agoyeah, to give more context. icons of the programs at that time would also be great.
- voltagex_ 13y agoSent you a couple of fixes.
- lamby 13y agoOh - how? I haven't received an email/PR/blah.
- 13y ago
- danieldk 13y agoThe chart clearly shows that there is a lot of proliferation, which is confusing to a lot of new users. Imagine what would be possible if all these fine developers would focus on two or three distributions. Ps. I am proud that I was a paid co-developer of the very first distribution listed ;).
- pjmlp 13y agoWell, for any of us old enough, this is the revival of UNIX wars.
- matt__rose 13y agoNot quite. The UNIX wars were basically "Hardware" wars. Basically, you bought your workstation from Sun, or HP, or SGI, or IBM or whoever, and you got the version of UNIX that was shipped for that hardware. You could compile your own BSD (/usr/ucb) or GNU (/usr/local) utils if you didn't want to pay a king's ransom for a compiler, but basically, the idea of running any type of software on any hardware, a la Linux or OpenBSD, hadn't really caught on. I know it's cool to be all blase about this, but this is different.
- pjmlp 13y agoThat is only part of the picture. Many of us bear scars from trying to write portable software across commercial UNIX systems, while discovering that POSIX only covered part of the required features, and even the POSIX ones had implementation defined behaviours. Not to mention the wonders of each system having their own UI toolkits, besides each XWindows flavour. I did it between AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Xenix, DG/UX.
- jzelinskie 13y ago>Imagine what would be possible if all these fine developers would focus on two or three distributions. You don't think the lessons learned by those developers' experimentation weren't shared and applied in the decision-making process for more prominent distros? In a way, creating a distro is like contributing to all the other distros at the same time. What makes them fine developers is their drive to innovate and try new things so that one day the status quo can improve. Who knows: if all those developers worked on the same few distributions, they may have crashed and burned.
- phpnode 13y agoWhat about all the distributions that don't include GNU, or those that only include a tiny proportion of GNU code, is there a chart that includes those?
- sparkie 13y agoThey don't actually exist - it's just hot air from the anti-GNU crowd.
- herokusaki 13y agoDid you mean this comment to be sarcastic? Android and a lot of embedded Linux distributions are not GNU/Linux.
- nailer 13y agoAndroid doesn't have glibc, and it's the most popular consumer computing platform.
- Gormo 13y agoIt's the most popular platform for mobile devices; the most popular consumer computing platform is still Windows.
- lmm 13y agoWasn't RedHat originally a Slackware derivative?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- donniezazen 13y agoSuch a waste of time and manpower creating all these forks. I wish folks spent time scratching their itch by writing great software for Linux instead of trying to reinvent the same wheel. And yet folks will continue to fork platform trying to solve problem that doesn't exist.
- Gormo 13y agoSince someone intentionally created each fork, doing so was demonstrably not a "waste of time and manpower". If people perceive a problem, it demonstrably exists; whether or not other people also experience the same problem is scarcely relevant.
- jbeja 13y agoLike is not happening in every other platform.
- donniezazen 13y agoYeah, I don't know if Mac or Windows have 1000 forks. Do they?
- jk4930 13y agoMany of the forks weren't/aren't serious anyway and the majority died out pretty soon, they shouldn't be seen as competition or wasted time. If you just want to experiment and don't want to pay attention to some community guidelines etc., then forking is better. It is exactly this freedom I love about Linux or open source in general.
- bvk 13y agoA distro with enough options to satisfy the creators of every fork would be an unholy mess. 1,000 separate contributors are very good at adding every option under the sun to a piece of software. But reducing choices to the point where you can just burn a CD and "install Debian" is anti-parallelizable.
- donniezazen 13y ago
- thiagoc 13y agoOutdated and misleading. For instance, Korora is based on Fedora, not in Gentoo.
- davidgerard 13y agoI put this chart as the example on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_forks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_forks
- ThinkBeat 13y agoWhat tool was used to create this graph? Does anyone know? I often find the need to create such a diagram. I am hoping the answer is not Photoshop.
- Gormo 13y agoThe comments in the SVG file indicate that it was made with Gnuclad: https://launchpad.net/gnuclad https://launchpad.net/gnuclad.
- tomich 13y agoThis is awesome, reminds me of this pngs I've been saving for a while (don't remember the source, but is probably written on the pngs somewhere) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26820220/unix.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26820220/unix.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26820220/windows.png https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26820220/windows.png