When Ubuntu started, Debian was the base. Ubuntu took what Debian made and added polish. Debian still needs a lot of polish if used directly to make a distro, many default settings are atrocious.
These days, there are many distros using Ubuntu as a solid base and changing the desktop experience. All the official flavours (Kubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, etc) plus unofficial - notably Mint, Pop, and elementary, which get their own category in these graphs instead of adding to Ubuntu's line.
If Ubuntu disappeared or never existed, these other distros would also not appear on these charts and things would be very different.
All these charts really show is that Ubuntu's own desktop is losing popularity.
I am not buying that statistic, I moved away from obongo and so did many people I know, but I still assume obongo is still #1.
The distrowatch ranking seem to correlate with enthusiast community interest, aka what linux forums talk about and what linux youtubers make videos about.
That being said, obongo feel like bloatware lately, also there was a time that it had the sweet spot between stability and usability (not being 10 years behind), nowadays I feel like even rolling release are stable enough.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 21.3 ms ] threadWhen Ubuntu started, Debian was the base. Ubuntu took what Debian made and added polish. Debian still needs a lot of polish if used directly to make a distro, many default settings are atrocious.
These days, there are many distros using Ubuntu as a solid base and changing the desktop experience. All the official flavours (Kubuntu, Ubuntu MATE, etc) plus unofficial - notably Mint, Pop, and elementary, which get their own category in these graphs instead of adding to Ubuntu's line.
If Ubuntu disappeared or never existed, these other distros would also not appear on these charts and things would be very different.
All these charts really show is that Ubuntu's own desktop is losing popularity.
The distrowatch ranking seem to correlate with enthusiast community interest, aka what linux forums talk about and what linux youtubers make videos about.
That being said, obongo feel like bloatware lately, also there was a time that it had the sweet spot between stability and usability (not being 10 years behind), nowadays I feel like even rolling release are stable enough.
With closed-source backend that cannot be changed and forced autoupdates, ubuntu no longer feels like proper linux.
Fedora 36 comes out of beta in a few days, so no more ubuntu for me.
Don’t believe the hype; Linux Mint is an Ubuntu flavor.