Boiling Steam recently analyzed the data of submitted reports from ProtonDB and nicely put them together into a bar graph. From their graph we can get a glimpse of who’s using what distro, as well as a timeframe of distros that are either losing traction or gaining momentum.

I mean, you don’t necessarily have to read their article; the graph pretty much sums it all up for us. The data goes from 2019 to 2023. Here’s a few of my own comments:

  • (vanilla) Arch continues to grow in popularity, and it’s not surprising, given the degree of customization it offers. It’s currently the most popular distro with over 20% of ProtonDB reporters using it
  • nearly half of submitted reports came from Ubuntu users back in 2019; they’ve been steadily shrinking ever since
  • Manjaro seems to be the “beginner’s version” of Arch – or, at least was. It was popular around 2020/2021, but gradually lost momentum starting in 2022
  • Pop!_OS went from barely used in 2019 to reaching its peak in mid-2021, but gradually losing users since
  • Mint had a strong foothold in 2019, but mostly lost traction since. Ties with Pop!_OS at the end
  • Fedora steadily gained more popularity as the years went by, and for good reason
  • EndeavourOS (Arch derivative) wasn’t used pretty much at all, then became more popular in 2022-2023
  • Debian is less popular than most of the other distros, but stayed solid well throughout 2019-2023

Some other thoughts:

  • interestingly enough I don’t see SteamOS anywhere. Perhaps that’s categorized under “Arch”. You’d figure that be on there, since it’s one of the most commonly used distros according to the Steam survey
  • I also don’t see Nobara Project anywhere, though that could also be classified under “Fedora”, or perhaps it’s one of those gray areas on the graph that aren’t labeled

It’s not surprising at all to see Ubuntu fall. The distro that once upon a time most everybody recommended as the beginner’s journey to Linux is now controlled by a bunch of bloodthirsy executives who are dropping Flatpak support, aggressively pushing Snaps forward, offering their so-called “Ubuntu Pro” membership to get updates faster, and…yeah I don’t really want to carry on with this rant. You get the idea.

Manjaro doesn’t come without its own controversies as well, ranging from SSL certificates not being renewed, and apparently not caring “about working with any other distributions.” So, to see the adoption of this distro shrink over time is understandable. It seems that if people aren’t going to use vanilla Arch, they’ll either resort to EndeavourOS or Garuda Linux; as we can see in the graph, both distros have been gaining more users over time.

I imagine once Pop!_OS incorporates their Rust-based desktop environment later this summer, it may pick up some more adoption – at least for a little while.

What are your thoughts on this data? What distro do you use as a daily driver, and why?

Cover image credit: Boiling Steam