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I am a 5 year Linux veterean. I started off with Ubuntu and Linux Mint. I then migrated to openSUSE and Fedora/Korora. After Korora was discontinued, I drifted over to Arch and back to Ubuntu MATE. I also dabbled in BSD variants too.
I drifted towards corporate sponsored distros like Canonical’s Ubuntu, Red Hat’s Fedora, and SUSE’s openSUSE. I felt the corporate touch would lead to a better experience for me. And in many ways I was right. Redhat and SUSE command a large portion of the market for alternative operating systems, accordingly it should be easy to use. Canonical should be no different.
However I always wondered what percentage of distros can be traced back to those three upstream projects, Debian, and Arch . There is no definite source of which OS is the most popular standing from a statistical perspective. Distrowatch can give a general trend for popularity of the various developer projects downstream. For simplicity, I am only going to review Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Arch Linux. I will be using some advanced searches on Distrowatch to get the final numbers. The numbers will reflect the current active,dormant, and inactive Linux forks.
After seeing the numbers, I am surprised that Fedora and openSUSE are so low. However Distrowatch does not entail total number of users for that distro. I know Distrowatch is more of a referral or a suggestion in general trends for OS popularity. Yet I question my idea that corporate Linux would be a better experience. Additionally this points that Linux is a volunteer product that does a great job for a better operating system.
Next month I hope to find the most popular desktop environment.