The best Linux distro for newcomers

Is Ubuntu the most popular Linux distros?

Have you wondered what is the most widely used Linux distribution? Popularity dictates the greater potential for a user to successfully access Linux. Because:

• It allows a user to more easily troubleshoot their system
• It allows a user to more easily customize or modify their system
• It allows a user to more easily install and upgrade their system.

The rest of this article consists of multiple case studies to try and determine what is the most popular distro. The TL;DR is that I’m arguing for new users to either pick Ubuntu, Arch Linux, or closely related distros when diving into Linux. Mostly because they are the ones with the most up-to-date accessibility to distro-related content.

Basically meaning: How easy it is to access things related to distro X, Y, or Z?

If I were to search DDG/Google for distro related terms, how many results would I get? If I were to check their wikis, reddits, forums, q&a sites, IRC, etc., how many potential people/posts would they have? If I were to start {programming, gaming, ricing}, how many guides would be distro-catered?

The kind of content that helps users install and upgrade the distro, troubleshoot their system, and get help on customization+modification.

Here are some of the topics I’ll be covering:

• Google Trends
• Google Search Results (Manual)
• Alexa Traffic Statistics
• Forum stats
• Wiki
• Reddit
• StackExchange/AskBot
• StackOverflow Tags
• The Linux Counter Project
• Steam Hardware & Software Survey
• Phoronix Linux Laptop Survey Results
• Stack Overflow Developer Survey
• DistroWatch Paradox
• Reddit r/Linux & r/unixporn Surveys
• Android & Chrome OS

Basic Stats

Google Trends

These seem to be the top 5 on Google Trends. Distros are “uninteresting” compared to Ubuntu. Bar chart averages: Ubuntu (87), Debian (13), Linux Mint (8), Fedora (5), Arch Linux (4).

If Ubuntu were considered to have 100 strength, then the rest of the distros added up would be shy of 35 strength.

Google Search Results (Manual)

Google trends figures out search terms using categories. E.g. “Fedora” checks the trend of the software and doesn’t include the Google Trend of hats.

But, out of curiosity, I decided to check how many results are shown by Google when typing in the following words. I added “Linux” to each search, downside being that they all share some results that simply have the word “Linux” in it.

• Ubuntu Linux: About 161m results
• Debian Linux: About 65.9m results (40.9% of Ubuntu)
• Linux Mint: About 56.2m results (34.9% of Ubuntu)
• Fedora Linux: About 61.5m results (38.2% of Ubuntu)
• Arch Linux: About 52.5m results (32.6% of Ubuntu)

And getting further diminishing results:

• Gentoo Linux: About 16.2m results (10.1% of Ubuntu)
• Elementary OS Linux: About 10.3m results (6.4% of Ubuntu)
• Manjaro Linux: About 2.2m results (1.4% of Ubuntu)
• Solus Linux: About 773k results (0.5% of Ubuntu)
• Qubes OS Linux: About 709k results (0.4% of Ubuntu)

Alexa Traffic Statistics

This measures the popularity of a distro’s website. I.e. not the popularity of Debian, but the popularity of debian.org instead. These results are listed as a “rank” number, which is Alexa’s rough estimate of each site’s popularity. (Lower Alexa rank is better).

The rank is calculated using a combination of average daily visitors to this site and pageviews (sic) on this site over the past 3 months. The site with the highest combination of visitors and pageviews (sic) is ranked #1.

Taken from Alexa.com (April 20th, 2019)

It’s interesting that sites like Red Hat (which serves more than just a distro) is still ranked below Ubuntu. And for Ubuntu, remember that none of the distro “flavors” with different websites were checked (e.g. Ubuntu vs. Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, …)

The below examples are formatted as Alexa (Site): Rank (Top-3-Countries). Bounce-Rate.

1. Ubuntu (ubuntu.com): 1,881 (19% China, 15% USA, 9.5% India). 50% bounce rate.
2. Red Hat (redhat.com): 3,431 (21% USA, 17% China, 12% India). 56% bounce rate.
3. Linux Mint (linuxmint.com): 4,021 (12% Brazil, 8% USA, 7% Germany). 73% bounce rate.
4. Debian (debian.org): 5,531 (18% China, 12% USA, 7% France). 55% bounce rate.
5. Arch Linux (archlinux.org): 7,608 (25% China, 14% USA, 6% Germany). 65% bounce rate.
6. Manjaro (manjaro.org): 17,001 (16% China, 13% USA, 9% Germany). 55% bounce rate.
7. openSUSE (opensuse.org): 21,152 (14% Germany, 11% USA, 10% France). 64% bounce rate.
8. Fedora (fedora.org): 42,700 (12.4% Angola, 12% USA, 8% India). 36% bounce rate.
9. Gentoo Linux (gentoo.org): 46,965 (15% USA, 14% China, 11% Japan). 70% bounce rate.
10. elementary OS (elementary.io): 64,073 (14% China, 14% USA, 7% Japan). 61% bounce rate.
11. Solus (getsol.us): 132,627 (14% India, 10% USA, 7% Brazil). 51% bounce rate.
12. Qubes OS (qubes-os.org): 213,831 (27% USA, 9% Germany, 7% India). 41% bounce rate.

Forums

I hypothesized these would skew in favor of older distributions. Hence the year in parentheses. The best I can do is suss out total member counts and post counts and sort by that. So it isn’t a “popularity contest”, but more a “content popularity” test. And ideally, it would’ve helped to know how many posts were made in the last year to get a better pulse.

Beans, Beans, the Musical Fruit, are good for your forum.

Ubuntu Forum Statistics (2004)— 13.2m beans (???), 2.2m threads, 2.1m members, 2.4k active members. I believe this forum also includes Ubuntu official flavors. (i.e. Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, …).

Linux Mint Forums (2006) — 1.5m posts, 234k topics, 118k members. The most users ever online concurrently was 2,029 (April 8th, 2019).

Gentoo Forums (2002)— 6m posts, 762k topics, 152k users. The most users ever online concurrently was 1,850 (December 30th, 2004).

Arch Linux Forums (2002)— 1.8m posts, 235k topics, 92k users. (Hands down, the easiest wiki to navigate and get information from as well as most modern looking).

FedoraForum.org (2003)— 1.7m posts, 300k threads, 79k members. DDG description of the site says “We would like to show you a description here but the site won’t allow us.”

Debian User Forums (1993) — 628k posts, 92k topics, 44.8k members. The most users ever online concurrently was 810. (As in eight hundred + ten users on February 2nd, 2012).

openSUSE Forums (2005)— 1m posts, 140k threads, 39k members, 1.4k active members. (I never did like these forums for some aesthetic reason as the readability was off-putting when trying to follow threads).

elementaryOS Linux Forums (2011)— 2k messages, 850 discussions, 5.3k members. (Definitely one of the nicer looking ones).

AFAICT: Solus (2015) and Manjaro (2012?) did not have readily available stats.

Wiki

I’m not actually sure how to check this for any distro besides Arch Linux.

ArchWiki — 4.6k pages, 575k edits, 33.6k users, 440 active users.

Reddit

Sorted by subscriber count (with percentage compared to Ubuntu). Comma separated by the number of upvotes on the top post from the past year.

Unsurprisingly, Ubuntu came out on top

1. r/Ubuntu — 111k members, 815 upvotes
2. r/archlinux — 84k members (76%), 700 upvotes (top 3 were related to ArchWiki)
3. r/debian — 26.6k members (24%), 147 upvotes
4. r/linuxmint — 25.9k members (23%), 262 upvotes (top 2 have to do with frugal financing)
5. r/Fedora — 19.7k members (18%), 206 upvotes (top 2 have to do with distro hopping)
6. r/elementaryos — 12.6k members (11%), 164 upvotes (top 2 have to do with Juno, the latest release)
7. r/ManjaroLinux — 12.3k members (11%), 223 upvotes
8. r/redhat — 11.4k members (10%), 158 upvotes
9. r/Gentoo — 8.6k members (8%), 106 upvotes (top 3 have to do with compiling packages)
10. r/SolusProject — 6.3k members (6%), 280 upvotes (7 of the top 10 are by the admin, u/JoshStrobl)

StackExchange / AskBot

Ask Ubuntu has almost a whopping double the number of questions, answers, and activity than the StackExchange for Unix & Linux! .:. Ubuntu > Unix & Linux (???)

1. Ask Ubuntu — 319k questions, 408k answers, 67% answered, 695k visits/day, 217 questions/day; ~145 questions/day should get answered.
2. Unix & Linux — 159k questions, 241k answers, 78% answered, 342k visits/day, 84 questions/day; ~66 questions/day should get answered.
3. Android Enthusiasts — 50k questions, 62k answers, 59% answered, 84k visits/day, 20 questions/day; ~12 questions/day should get answered.
4. Ask Fedora — 25k questions, rest unknown
5. elementary OS — 5.9k questions, 7.1k answers, 75% answered, 2.3k visits/day, 4.7 questions/day; 3 or 4 questions/day should get answered.

StackOverflow Tags

Italicized tags have actual StackExchanges where general support questions are considered on-topic. These tags are for programming questions specific to the distro. If you’re a programmer, perhaps this section might help you know what is most popular (along with the 2016 survey section below). N.B. this month actually means last 30 days; this year actually means last 365 days.

1. ubuntu — 45k questions, 500 asked this month, 5.7k this year
2. debian — 8k questions, 88 asked this month, 895 this year
3. redhat—3k questions, 41 asked this month, 420 this year
4. fedora — 2k questions, 12 asked this month, 188 this year
5. archlinux — 1.1k questions, 17 asked this month, 161 this year

linuxmint — 744 questions, 8 asked this month, 137 this year | manjaro — 104 questions, 5 asked this month, 64 this year | opensuse — 676 questions, 4 asked this month, 61 this year | gentoo — 289 questions, 3 asked this month, 27 this year | elementary — 40 questions, 1 asked this month, 16 this year | solus — 20 questions, 0 asked this month, 10 this year

Stack Overflow Developer Survey

A 2016 Stack Overflow Developer Survey showed the desktop operating system used among developer responses to be 56.7% Ubuntu, 8.8% Debian, 7.8% Mint, 6.5% Fedora, and 20.3% Other. Linux overall has changed from 21.7% of 56k total responses in 2016 to 25.6% of 90k total responses in 2019. No clue on the internal distro percentages shifting or remaining the same.

Steam Hardware & Software Survey

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Among Steam users, Linux has a paltry 0.82% share. (March 2019)

This article isn’t about overall OS popularity, but it does put into perspective to see how Linux is a mere fraction of the overall market share. And while writing this article, it hit me that distros are sort of another layer of fragmentation even smaller.

It’s safe to say that at least 1 in 3 Steam users on Linux are running some form of Ubuntu. (March 2019)

If we zoom into Linux-only survey results, then the responses are 31.9% Ubuntu, 9.1% Linux 4.x, 6.9% Manjaro, and 52.2% Other.

To get an idea of overall Steam users, I used the steam & game stats page. On April 20th, this showed 16.1m users. If the survey results line up correctly, that put’s Ubuntu users at approximately 42k and Manjaro users at approximately 9k. (Well… Ahem ahem, compared to the 1.5M Windows users…)

Phoronix Linux Laptop Survey Results

2017 Linux Laptop Survey Results - Phoronix

Of the 30k responses from this survey for the question “What Linux distribution(s) do you currently run on your laptop(s)?”, there were 11.6k points for Ubuntu. Correlating with the Valve/Steam survey above: Over 1 in 3 people using Ubuntu. (And according to this survey, another 1 in 3 is probably using Arch Linux).

1. Ubuntu (39%)
2. Arch Linux (27%)
3. Debian (15%)
4. Fedora (15%)
5. Linux Mint (11%)
6. openSUSE (4%)
7. Gentoo (4%)
8. CentOS / RHEL (3%)
9. Solus (2%)
10. Manjaro (2%)

The Reddit Slight

Okay, this is where things finally shift a little. Reddit puts Arch Linux higher than Ubuntu.

Unofficial 2015 r/Linux Distribution Survey

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/3i9swt/results_of_the_2015_rlinux_distribution_survey/

This unofficial survey collected ~3.2k responses. It’s from the Linux subreddit itself which (almost 4 years later) has 380k members.

Top 5: Arch Linux (28.5%), Ubuntu (22.5%), Debian (10%), Fedora (8.5%), and Linux Mint (6.8%)

The r/unixporn 2017 Survey Results

https://www.reddit.com/r/unixporn/comments/75afuu/the_runixporn_2017_survey_results/

By no means do I consider the unixporn subreddit to be an accurate representation of average consumer demographics, but I did want to share what the results of 4.6k individuals from 2017 stated:

r/unixporn is one of the few outlier surveys that dictates Arch Linux’s supremacy over Ubuntu in terms of popularity.

I was definitely expecting Arch to be the top distro on this particular subreddit. However I wasn’t expecting to see Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora as the following 2nd, 3rd, and 4th place distros.

DistroWatch Paradox

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

The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics have attracted plenty of attention and feedback over the years. […] This was prompted by a continuous abuse of the counters by a handful of undisciplined individuals who had confused DistroWatch with a poll station. […] Only one hit per IP address per day is counted.

The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more.

From DistroWatch (April 20th, 2019)

DistroWatch: Where your estimated distro popularity correlations are put in a state of confusion from all other measurements

DistroWatch might be a good place to get an idea of trending distros, but as far as overall popularity on a day-to-day basis for the average consumer, I’m not sure it holds much water.

The results get even more confusing when reconciling MX Linux being twice as popular as Ubuntu. (Or, similarly, Fedora being as equal in popularity to Solus, which based on everything I know, makes no sense).

major variants of distributions (e.g., Ubuntu vs. Ubuntu Mate) are sometimes reported separately. […] which means that Ubuntu’s total footprint is likely under-stated.

According to Lifewire’s The Top Linux Distributions Of All Time by Gary Newell updated February 20th, 2019.

Have you heard Pop! OS being mentioned a lot more on Reddit or YouTube videos? I was actually wondering whether it was the trendy FOTM (“flavor of the month”) before seeing this table!

The Linux Counter Project

https://web.archive.org/web/20180623220002/https://www.linuxcounter.net/statistics

The counter exists since 1993 (originally on counter.li.org) and it is the most official and popular counter of linux users and linux machines in the www. […] The basic idea is for people to register themselves as being a Linux user. Of course, this way you won’t get all Linux users counted as not every Linux user will register himself at the Linux Counter site. Thus, the only way to “know” the number of Linux users worldwide, is to make a guess, [… ]And so, there we are.

Taken from linuxcounter.net via web.archive.org (April 20th, 2019)

This counter “died” in December 2018. They have 165k registered machines. However, the most popular kernel in their statistics report is 2.6.32 (released in 2009) and the uptime on some of the machines are reportedly over 68 years… Just a couple reasons why I didn’t look too deeply into this.

(Regardless, Ubuntu was by and far the most popular with 39k, followed by Debian with 27k and Fedora with 10k).

Android & Chrome OS

I decided these weren’t “distros”, so no need to compare them. For curiosity’s sake, here are a couple of stats:

Google Trends

This time it’s Ubuntu’s turn to pale in comparison.

Android (84), Ubuntu (10), Chromebook (3), Chrome OS (0).

Reddit

1. r/Android — 1.6m members (over 10x Ubuntu’s)
2. r/chromeos — 68.4k members (between Arch and Debian)

Summary

Quality over quantity. It is true that there are a lot of Ubuntu users and content creators. But how could one measure the quality of this content being put out by the community and consumed by the community?

How do we know that all the questions on the Ask Ubuntu Stack Exchange would be equivalent to the number of general support questions asked on traditional forums? How do we know whether the users of r/Ubuntu are more or less passionate about their subreddit? How do we know if the Ubuntu users had to jump through many more hoops to play on Steam rather than the Manjaro users?

(Then again, how much of the problems that you’ve faced on Linux were distro-agnostic and could be solved by reading the ArchWiki for configuring firewalls in Debian or reading an Ask Ubuntu answer for configuring gnome in Fedora?)

Well, that would be seriously out of the scope of this article and I have to end somewhere. So here are some top 3's:

Google Trends

1. Ubuntu (100 points)
2. Debian (15 points)
3. Linux Mint (9 points)

Google Search Results (Manual)

1. Ubuntu (100 points)
2. Debian (41 points)
3. Fedora (38 points)

Alexa Traffic Statistics

• #1,881 Ubuntu
• #4,021 Linux Mint
• #5,531 Debian

Wiki
(Not enough data.)

1. Arch (100 points)

Reddit

1. Ubuntu (100 points)
2. Arch Linux (80 points)
3. Debian, Linux Mint, Fedora (25 points)
4. elementary OS, Manjaro, Solus (15 points)

StackExchange/AskBot

1. Ubuntu (100 points)
2. Fedora (8 points)
3. elementary OS (2 points)

StackOverflow Tags

1. Ubuntu (100 points)
2. Debian (17 points)
3. Red Hat (7 points)
4. Fedora (3 points)

Stack Overflow Developer Survey

1. Ubuntu (57 points)
2. Debian, Mint, Fedora (7 points)
3. Other

Steam Hardware & Software Survey
There could be other variants of Ubuntu in the missing 60% of the survey results.

1. Ubuntu (32 points)
2. Manjaro (7 points)

Phoronix Linux Laptop Survey Results

1. Ubuntu (100 points)
2. Arch Linux (70 points)
3. Debian (40 points)

Reddit Surveys

1. Arch Linux (60 points)
2. Ubuntu (40 points)
3. Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint (20 points)

Conclusion

Ubuntu is dead, long live Ubuntu.

✔️ ease of troubleshooting problems for newcomers
✔️ plenty of programmer activity on stack overflow
✔️ strongest gamer/steam presence identified (1 in 3 linux users)

Having come in a very strong 1st place for most categories, Ubuntu is by and far the most popular linux distribution.

That is, while looking through this lens and accepting this data as “wholesome”. (A pretty big if).

Since Linux is already a small community it may be wise for newcomers deciding on a distro to stick with the one that can help them the most with the most readily accessible and available content on the web.

This non-scientific, random analysis leads me to believe that the distro for those newcomers should undoubtedly be Ubuntu. In my opinion, it’s a very safe bet to suggest that not only to Linux newbies, but those looking to distro-hop for similar reasons.

As a thought experience is there anything in Ubuntu that you absolutely detest compared to your favorite distro? After all, it’s a bit of a pain to get newer kernels and compile your own packages, but surely it’s doable. Can you think of any strong examples why newcomers to Linux should steer clear / avoid Ubuntu?