Linux Distros: Ubuntu and Manjaro Fall Further into Oblivion – February 2024

https://boilingsteam.com/ubuntu-and-manjaro-fall-further-into-oblivion-february-2024/

by ekianjo • 2 years ago

40 17 2 years ago

ethagnawl• 2 years ago

The title of this post is missing a critical qualifier: gaming.

wkat42422• 2 years ago

True but I hear less and less love for Ubuntu from other Linux users. Mint seems on the rise though, a lot of people hate snap and mint removing it from Ubuntu fixes that problem.

eternityforest2• 2 years ago

This kind of worries me, Ubuntu is by far my favorite distro, and one of the only reasons I don't just go back to windows after 10+ years of Linux, largely specifically because of Snap.

Although, I suppose if it went down some Flatpak based distro might take it's place eventually.

m463• 2 years ago

I don't like ubuntu (lots of sneaky phone home stuff, forced updates, etc) but they do provide a sort of frozen os with a stable ABI.

I honestly don't know how game developers provide binaries for linux (especially with sound and graphics). It seems to be more source compatible than binary compatible.

I suspect with ubuntu, they can just target ubuntu 14.04 or 16.04 and it will probably work with later ubuntu versions.

Can you ship a game For arch? it seems like periodically there would be a firedrill and the game would have to recompiled and an update pushed out. (or is the deal with arch that the OS adapts to the games?)

lkdfjlkdfjlg• 2 years ago

nagara (?), popos (?), manjaro, flatpak, and endeavor all have bigger market share than debian? Can this be correct?

Separately. Since linux distros have a hierarchical structure (A based off B based off C) these market share graphs could be smarter. Namely it'd be more useful to have "debian and things downstream to debian" represented rather than just debian itself (maybe in addition to picture we're given, if not instead).

kryptiskt• 2 years ago

This is a sample of Linux gamers, they are not likely to dream of the stability of Debian.

doubled112• 2 years ago

I game on Debian. I appreciate the fact that whatever I'm doing today will still work tomorrow.

Gaming on Linux is better than it has ever been, even in a distro that might be "old".

With that in mind, pros and cons. I understand why that might not be the case for others.

weare138• 2 years ago

Well they list Flatpak as a distro and I have a feeling they're including SteamOS running on Steam Decks in the stats which is based on Arch now. I'm not sure how much we should read into these stats.

MrBrobot2• 2 years ago

So we’re measuring flatpak separately how.. if I’ve installed Steam via Flatpak instead of Pacman? So I fall into Flatpak, and not Manjaro? Am I missing something? That seems flawed.

abrookewood• 2 years ago

Maybe they can't tell what the underlying OS is when running via Flatpak?

MrBrobot2• 2 years ago

This is how it parses data from your workstation data (pulled from Steam).

System Information Parsed Successfully! OS: Freedesktop SDK 23.08 (Flatpak runtime) KERNEL: 6.7.0-0-MANJARO CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 GPU DRIVER: NVIDIA 545.29.06 RAM: 32 GB

Should be easy enough to match the data back to the correct distro.

tamimio• 2 years ago

Mint, Debian, and NixOS are my main ones and I don’t think it will change anytime soon.

1letterunixname• 2 years ago

If instead of desktop popularity, there were a need to run servers (non-RPi):

- Reliability, long life, low security patch, delay and maximum compatibility for enterprisey things with a faint hope of rip-replacing with RHEL for $upport (BYO RPMs of new shit): CentOS 9 Stream*

- (Same as above but it doesn't have to be Linux): FreeBSD or SmartOS

- Replace VMware: Oxide (hw+sw) or Triton Datacenter/SmartOS

- Cheap, reliable, maximum package choices: Debian

- Beginner Linux skills requiring guides from the interwebs (reliability and security updates optional): Ubuntu LTS

- Live in an empty room without furniture: Alpine

- Maximum tinkerability in a test environment without user support: Arch or NixOS

* Alma and Rocky while having a longer lifecycle promise, remain vulnerable for much longer by shipping security fixes slowly and have EL compatibility gotchas. Their engineering is also slower and less resourced.

Default to standardizing on Cent without a very good exceptional reason(tm), don't do a hodgepodge, and do configuration management.

cf100clunk2• 2 years ago

Its not about desktop popularity or servers, its about gaming distros, or rather the packaging systems being used that the ProtonDB data seems to choke on.

cf100clunk2• 2 years ago

The headline (should say Linux Gaming Distros) reminded me of DistroWatch's informative value to the community, aside from its unusual ranking system:

https://distrowatch.com/

In this case, the ProtonDB data analysis yields results that might not be specifically about the underlying distro per se and more about the packaging system used, as others here have pointed out.

Linux Distros: Ubuntu and Manjaro Fall Further into Oblivion – February 2024

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