DistroWatch
 |
 | |
 | |
Type of site | News website |
|---|---|
| Available in | English, French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Russian, Swedish, Hindi, Tamil, Japanese, Persian, Turkish, Hebrew, Vietnamese |
| Owner | Ladislav Bodnar |
| Revenue | Advertisement |
| URL | distrowatch |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | No |
DistroWatch is a website which provides news, popularity rankings, and other general information about various Linux distributions as well as other free software/open source Unix-like operating systems such as OpenSolaris, MINIX and BSD. It now contains information on several hundred distributions.[2]
History
It was originally published on 31 May 2001, and is maintained by Ladislav Bodnar.[3]
Initially, Bodnar also wrote the Distrowatch Weekly (DWW). In November 2008, Bodnar decided to step down from the post of editor for (DWW). Bodnar said he would still continue to maintain the site[4] while the DWW would be written by Chris Smart.[5]As of 9 August 2015[update], DistroWatch has donated a total of $44,175 USD to various open source software projects since the launch of the Donations Program in March 2004.[6]
Features
The site maintains extensive comparison charts detailing differences between the package sets and software revisions of different distributions. It also provides some general characteristics of distributions such as the price and the supported processor architectures.[7] There is also a Distrowatch weekly (often abbreviated DWW) that comes out on Monday "as a publication summarising the happenings in the distribution world on a weekly basis".[4] Distrowatch has a monthly donations program, a joint initiative between DistroWatch and two online shops selling low-cost CDs and DVDs with Linux, BSD and other open source software.
Accuracy of the hit counters
Bodnar has written that "I'd like to believe that there is some truth in the figures, but in all honesty, they really don't mean all that much and should not be taken very seriously" and "NOT an indication of [...] market share or quality".[8]
PCWorld has written that "the page-hit counts on DistroWatch give some indication of which distributions are drawing the most interest at the moment, of course, but such measures can't be assumed to gauge who's actually using what or which are preferred overall".[9]
Muktware has written that "DistroWatch is not an indication of 'how many users' but it is clearly an indication of what users are looking at".[10]
References
- ^ "Distrowatch.com Site Info". Alexa Internet. Retrieved 2015-06-21.
- ^ "DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD". DistroWatch. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
- ^ "DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD". DistroWatch. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
- ^ a b "DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD". DistroWatch. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
- ^ "DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD". DistroWatch. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
- ^ "DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 620, 27 July 2015". DistroWatch. Retrieved 9 August 2015.
- ^ e.g. see the Red Hat Enterprise Linux page on the web site http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=redhat
- ^ "Groklaw - Some Facts about openSUSE and Distrowatch Figures - A Correction". Groklaw. 11 January 2007. Retrieved 17 June 2012.
- ^ Noyes, Katherine (25 April 2012). "Which Linux Distro Is Fairest of Them All? Ubuntu, Survey Says". PCWorld. Retrieved 17 June 2012.
- ^ Richards, Neil (10 January 2012Z). "Linux Mint Touches All Time High On DistroWatch, Will Ubuntu Recover?". Muktware. Retrieved 8 July 2012.
