[sf-lug] Linux distros -- follow-up on DW's wide selection

[aaronco36]

Quoting Bobbie Sellers <bliss-sf4ever at dslextreme.com> from [1]:

>> On 1/8/19 11:47 AM, Justin Noor wrote [2]:
>> Hey Bobbie off the top of your head, roughly how many Linux
>> distros do you think exist?
>
>
> If you look at Distrowatch and the Distrowatch weekly
> newsletter you can find the numbers but if  you mean active
> distros less than 400.
>
> Many of these are regional adaptation, like Deepin and Ubuntu
> Kyolin for Asian userrs, Septor for Serbians, there is a Turkish
> distro and quite a few oltehr
> France has several, Russia has several copying old Mandriva.
>
> Then there are server only distribution, forensic, and distros
> for hobbyists like the Ham Radio operators, and anime/manga lovers.
> <https://distrowatch.com/>


Distrowatch also has a quite topically-relevant 'Visual family tree of 
Linux distributions' shown in reference [3].

IMNSHO, the most interesting image here is the large, expandable 
distro-family-tree.png shown in [4]. From this Distro Family Tree image, I 
think the major and "original" parent _Linux_ distros that have served as 
the bases for the wide gamut of so many other derivative distros are, 
going from top to bottom, ...
- Slackware (1994)
- Fedora and Red Hat (1997)
- Mandriva (1998)
- Debian [GNU/Linux] (1996)
- Gentoo (2002)

Note also from the Distro Family Tree image[4] that Ubuntu has apparently 
spawned the most "active" derivations since 2002 in terms of both absolute 
numbers as well as Distrowatch popularity -- see [5] or enter the 
appropriate search criteria for Ubuntu in [6].


-A


=====================================================
References
=====================================================
[1]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2019q1/013638.html
[2]http://linuxmafia.com/pipermail/sf-lug/2019q1/013636.html
[3]https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=family-tree
[4]https://distrowatch.com/images/other/distro-family-tree.png
[5]https://distrowatch.com/search.php?ostype=Linux&category=All&origin=All&basedon=Ubuntu&notbasedon=None&desktop=All&architecture=All&package=All&rolling=All&isosize=All&netinstall=All&language=All&defaultinit=All&status=Active#simple
[6]https://distrowatch.com/search.php
=====================================================


aaronco36 at sdf.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.org