Linux Distros Evolution - January 2024 Update: Pop!_OS in Decline?
Linux Gaming, Steam Deck Gaming | Boiling Steam
An interesting trend graph of the most diffused distros and their adoption by users over time.
Very interesting, thanks for sharing. I didnt realise that Arch adoption was so high. I (don't) use arch, BTW. Although now I feel like I want to give it a spin to see what all the fuss is about!
Or maybe I'll stay fat, dumb, and happy with Fedora and Nobara on my desktop and laptop.
Not that it would change anything for me personally, but I really think Pop! OS is a poor naming choice. Who puts an exclamation mark in their name? Aside from Yahoo! I suppose.
Stick with Fedora and Nobara, they are good distros. I use Arch myself, because I like that bleeding edge, bro - but if those other distros are working for you, there's pretty much no reason for the average person to switch.
Nobara is sooo hyped. It is not a secure Distro. They literally
I recommend to use bazzite.gg if you want Gaming. They do all the Nobara fixes but
Arch was great for teaching me about Linux. It was rough, I completely borked my system about 3-4 times in the course of about 10 months lol. But it taught me valuable lessons on how to fix a destroyed system, how to use Timeshift to rollback changes, how to patch drivers and specific system packages, etc.
Ultimately, it was the constant fiddling that got me to go away from Arch and towards Nobara for my main gaming PC. I just wanted an OS that was stable, had great gaming performance, and didn't require me to install a bunch of obscure packages and tools like Arch needed to get certain things to work.
Nobara has been fantastic so far and is probably my go-to distro recommendation for folks who plan on gaming hard on Linux, their pre-included kernel patches and utilities like Protonup-QT are awesome for gamers.
I installed LMDE on my work IT laptop recently and overall I like it. Have had a few annoying bugs because of Debian's old packages, but everything is ironed out now and it's great. Something stable and basic that gets out of the way for me to do my job.
Personally, I think they should make LMDE the default version of Linux Mint.
Debian -> Ubuntu -> Linux Mint vs Debian -> LMDE
Since it's more upstream, it should be more up-to-date and secure, right?
I feel like basing a distro off of Ubuntu is sort of a crutch. It's makes things easier at the beginning, but ultimately it holds you back as a distro developer
Panic! At the Disco
Who puts an exclamation mark in their name? Aside from Yahoo! I suppose.
And Westward Ho!
i think the high arch use is mostly steam deck users running steamos.
Pop is stagnant while they work on Cosmic. I'm one of the people who left because of that.
I am still actively maintaining Pop!_OS. COSMIC has not changed that aspect of my job. Just within the last week I packaged Linux 6.6.8, Mesa 23.3.2, Just 1.22, Rust 1.75.0, and updated Popsicle's dependencies to fix a bindgen build error with recent versions of Clang. We have a systemd update that was packaged today, and I'll be doing another linux-firmware backport soon. So I don't understand why you'd think it is stagnant. We're even shipping Pipewire 1.0.0 by default, which Ubuntu hasn't yet done in the latest version. People usually complain that we update too often.
I'm not using Pop, but am somewhat interested in their development. In what way is it stagnant?
Yeah, I love me some Flatpak distro ;-)
On the serious note, I'm sad openSUSE is so low. Tumbleweed's great distro!
I used to use Tubleweed, but I tested Fedora Silverblue to check out what the immutability is all about and never returned. I think I will switch to OpenSuse Aeon, but for now it does not support Full Disk Encryption which is a deal breaker for me.
An interesting trend graph of the most used distros for gaming and their adoption by users over time.
Yeah, the article mentions it in the first few sentences, but OP sure did bury the lede.
It's probably best to take this whole graph with a grain of salt. There's already some questionable relationships in it, like for every 4th Manjaro user coming in a Gentoo user, which I find hard to believe to say the list.
Second, it's hard to say Pop exclamation mark underscore OS is on the decline when the whole field just looks more diversified in general. Sure the hype around gaming distros from the lockdowns seems to have cooled down a bit, but there isn't any distro that just disappeared. On the contrary, it seems to have gotten just more.
As already mentioned, we can expect another hype again when Cosmic DE launches.
These days I'm most interested in Endeavour and Garuda, mostly as gateways into the Arch world without the headaches. Endeavour seems more mature so that'll be my next install.
I'm giving up on Manjaro since it seems to lag and have odd discrepancies with Arch/AUR.
Going further back I liked Mint and SuSE and even Ubuntu, but the lack of gaming focus has driven me to other distros.
I'm on Manjaro since 5 years and don't have any lags or "odd discrepancies" with the AUR (AMD setup, xanmod kernel). The general antipathy towards Manjaro on is not justified IMHO.
Love both of those distros, Endeavour is committed (their philosophy) to no GUI, only CLI commands, so keep that in mind. Garuda Gaming edition is the best gaming distro out there imo, handy GUI to configure everything, great privacy controls/browser. Manjaro should never be used, they hold back packages for "testing" which goes against Arch in general and can break AUR packages, thus your system. Another good Arch distro, minimal with optimized kernels, a privacy browser based on Firefox, is CachyOS. Those three I would recommend for Arch, besides Arch itself.
Endeavour is committed (their philosophy) to no GUI, only CLI commands, so keep that in mind.
That's actually the first time I've seen that mentioned. It's not highlighted on their website, in fact I had to go digging for this old 2019 article to get some insight on the philosophy there.
I'm not afraid of CLI so this is fine. I'm not an expert by any means but using it more will push me to learn. The updater frontend in Manjaro is kind of inconsistent anyway (e.g. it only shows Flatpaks sometimes) so I've often found myself using pacman in the terminal already.
How many AUR packages do you actually use? It's mostly Electron "apps" anyway.
Barely any, honestly. I only vaguely recall one or two instances in the past year where I couldn't find what I needed as a Flatpak or similar ready-to-go app. As a general user it's pretty great honestly and I'm impressed at how easy it's become.
I'm running Pop on my living room pc and it's fine, looking forward to Cosmic when it arrives. Also have Linux Mint cinnamon on my bedroom pc. Been thinking of going back to Arch, but i'm lazy so i'll stick with what i have unless i get annoyed enough to switch.
I was just looking at this graph and thinking of posting it here... thanks for saving me the trouble! I only had a couple of thoughts (and accepting the data comes only from ProtonDB and I'm a gamer so this makes the data especially interesting): it's nice to see Arch and Arch-based distros doing so well; if you add them together they're quite a large block, and I'm also not sad about Ubuntu's falling share (it's become very corporate - at least that's my feeling, I don't follow such stuff very closely). Oh, and I just tried out Nobara and was very impressed with it as a gaming distro (I got better FPS playing Warframe than I did on Windows 11) and it's good to see that getting a small but growing share.
PopOS is what got me into Linux, and the only one that worked "out of the the box" for the handful of things I wanted, esp remote desktop.
Yes, anecdotal, but I'm running 3 PCs on Pop and loving it.
Edit: reading the article, and graph, it also looks like the field is more crowded in general. Also, would be good to see total installs over time, not just %.
I used Pop on my main computer for almost a year before switching back to Mint last year. There were a lot of good things about it - for instance, it had the best compatibility out of the box with my hardware out of everything I tried. But I also saw some stability issues, and I personally dislike it's aesthetic, and I'm not really interested in trying Cosmic. I still recommend it to people but it's not for me.
I guess the Pop bubble has... Popped.
Sorry.
Ugh, fine, have an upvote.
Pop os is incredibly ancient. I imagine it will explode in popularly when Cosmic is released and the distro gets a refresh.
2022 was only a year and a half ago, and we ship the latest Linux kernel, firmware, Mesa libraries, NVIDIA drivers and libraries, Pipewire/Wireplumber, ZFS, Firefox, Alacritty, Lutris, Steam, and Rust. Since when did we start considering that to be "incredibly ancient"? The next LTS release is not yet available to base Pop!_OS upon, but we ship newer kernels and drivers than the latest version of Ubuntu.
There are people for whom 2 weeks is too old, don't mind them.
Ironically it's also this type of user that tends to get in over their head with rolling bleeding distros and destroy their system. 😄
I tend to think about it as the "wild" years, it's a time in a PC enthusiast's life when they want to experiment with lots of stuff and only the most fresh will do. But there are lots of people who appreciate a bit of stability more.
Yeah ignore the hate. I really don't get what that other poster could possibly be missing. LTS versions are where it's at anyway. I've been loving pop and am looking forward to cosmic (when it's ready). Like you say with all the kernel and libraries updated it's totally fine to stay on the LTS.
Pop is awesome!
2022 did not ship the latest of everything. Check the versions compared to Debian, Ubuntu for Fedora. They are all out of date.
It isn't a big deal as I use pop os on a work machine with distrobox.
Makes sense to me. I'm a Pop! user since 22.04 and the wait is painful, although the blog posts definitely help a bit. Currently I have no problems but if something breaks I'll try out Nobara I guess. My /home is already partitioned so I can make that hop with minimal loss.
Also switched distros from pop. I've had more success with Ultramarine than with Nobara on my nvidia-powered laptop. Check it out if Nobara gives you problems.
I'm running full AMD on a desktop, I don't foresee any problems here. Hopefully your advice helps someone though!
I'm guessing Arch's dominance is largely due to SteamOS?
Pop has not received feature updates for years, because the dev team focuses on implementing Cosmic.
Given the overall progress of Linux Desktop environments, this might have led many users to switch away from Pop.
Very interesting. My rig is still on Pop mostly because I've just never had issues with it. I use the Liquorix kernel for a little added spice.
On my laptop I've been playing with NixOS lately (used to run Arch btw). I love it so far, but haven't explored it for gaming.
Some reeeeally weird trends here
After the bug with pop_os that happened to Linus I stopped using it. I'd like reliable system and clearly the pop_os team doesn't know how to package their software if a dependency error that bad happens
They commented on their video that it was their fault. There was never a packaging issue. The issue was that we pushed a systemd source package update to Launchpad, which silently didn't build or publish the 32-bit systemd library packages, because Ubuntu had systemd on a blacklist for 32-bit package builds. We noticed this minutes after packages were published, and had it fixed within an hour later.
This didn't actually affect any systems in the wild because apt held back the update until we had worked around the restriction on Launchpad (there was an invisible ceiling to the package version number). They were only affected during that time period because they manually entered that sentence from the prompt in a terminal. We stopped using Launchpad with 21.10, so all packages released since then are the same packages that are built and tested by our packaging server, and used by our QA team internally.
The drama and reputational damage that LTT caused was unnecessary. Especially given that they uploaded this video a week later, and never attempted to reach out. They still have yet to properly edit the video.
Linus as I Linus tech tips? Imagine giving a shit about that scummy ass clown.
That vid is actually good, it exposes lots of issues that regular users run into when switching to linux, in fact debian changed apt to make it harder to remove essential packages like linus did.
On Arch to remove essential package you will not be prompted with confirmation to remove them, you will have to add --nodeps --nodeps twice to the command to be able to do so, no idea how long this has been the case on arch or if it was implemented after linus vid as well, but that is something that should have been that way a decades ago, I still see on reddit posts of people that accidentally delete grub or remove important directories from their system.