What are the popular and mainstream distro's right now

I haven't been involved with any linux OS' in awhile. Can someone give me a breif list of the new mainstream and popular distros available?

 

Mainly Ubuntu and Mint at this point (and Android, if you count that as a distro).

 

Ubuntu, Mint, CentOS. Those are my 3 favourites as well.

 

Raspbian! Debian =p

 

http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity

 

People I talk to have been dumping Ubuntu and going to Debian.

 

As people get more comfortable with Ubuntu (esp server) many do tend to move to Debian over time, IME, so I agree with the mod's observation above.

For people who prefer rolling-releases, there is Arch Linux. It's more along the lines of a '90s Slackware or Gentoo install.

Fedora / CentOS / RHEL / Scientific Linux are still popular Redhat based distros. Of the four in this group, I encounter & support Fedora the most.


--

For the X-variable, and I know this isn't *true Linux*, there's the BSD, NeXT-derived Mac OS X. It is possible to build a hackintosh, legalities aside (just do everyone a favor and at minimum buy one of the OS X upgrades, so Apple at least get paid for its work). There is a community behind this and it is *no harder* to specify a self-built desktop rig and install the OS than a *'90s Linux distro was*. The community maintains a list of compatible hardware and utilities to bootstrap and install the system. See - https://www.tonymacx86.com/ . Just stick to the hardware they recommend (Asus or Gigabyte boards, listed nVidia cards, bluetooth and wireless chipsets, etc), which for me tends to be the hardware I purchase anyway. I actually have LESS problems with my hackintosh that I do with my iMac, with regard to Operating Systems upgrades (post-upgrade complications) from Apple, if you can believe that!

--

 

Distro Watch counts popularity by hits on their distro pages. This is not a good proxy for general popularity/market-share.

 

True, but where else can you even get a list of general popularity?

At least DW changed their page count policy a long time ago to only count 1 hit per day per ip.

 

I can answer from the Software industry point of view.

Most servers (in Datacenters/Cloud/Colo) run Debian or Ubuntu. If you go to any of the Cloud providers, the default images would most likely be one of these 2 for the VMs.

Both have rich software development and packages support. For Developer workstations in companies, I've seen Ubuntu to be the go-to choice. Redhat/Fedora/CentOS and Suse/openSUSE have some industry presence, but have gone down off late than the share they used to have 5-10 years ago. Few enterprise companies use Redhat or Suse because of their paid support options.

If you want rich software support (readily available packages, repositories) - Ubuntu and Debian are hard to beat because of their popularity.

I personally use openSUSE (for personal purposes) and Ubuntu (at work).

 

Debian has a ton of packages, and several other distributions have split off from them.
Ubuntu is supposedly friendly, and Canonical backs it.
I like gentoo, but I like poking at the internals myself and having options.
I might try SteamOS with my next computer, just to see how usable it is for general use.
Maybe some day the IT director will be like, "Ok, this is our standard install base for the IT infrastructure of our corporation since it has the best driver support...SteamOS"

 

I think all old curmudgeons like me started seriously running Linux servers on Slackware back in the nineties. Since then I've been through all the major branches at one time or another. Now I run all my servers and PCs with Debian to keep things standardized and simple to manage. I've long regarded Ubuntu, perhaps wrongly, as the OS where all Linux noobs go to cut their teeth on. So when I woke up one morning and learned that they made a server version, I went: "Wait, what? Who'd seriously use that in a datacenter?". It conjured up images of sysadmins managing services with some silly compiz cube interface.

Well of course I was mostly wrong and they've come a long way. Several hosting solutions run on Ubuntu server now. I just haven't found any good reason to start using it now that I have everything setup perfectly with Debian.

 

LMDE2 Betsy (debian) has been chugging along just fine since they transitioned from LMDE1 on my trusty CF-52 thanks to the west coast folks using Toughbooks. Once I got citrix receiver to work I never looked back at windows as everything I need works just fine.