distrowatch feedback

brent

do people make decisions about a product because of the quantity of feedback?

I would be hesitant to choose an unpopular OS to install on my machine, it's an indicator that it might not be well-maintained or support might wane or even drop in the future. That has not been the case in my 4 years of using Solus. Initially, looking at the forums and the development portal convinced me of that. But I can see how people might be look at something like the number of reviews as an indicator for how popular (and thus, "healthy") a distro is. (Not that it's accurate.)

I check out DistroWatch from time to time. It's been an interesting way to see what's "trending" in the Linux distro world and they do post about recent updates and releases so I'll browse their news section from time to time as well so for me it's a decent niche tech resource. Just always be mindful of how DistroWatch acquires their trending/popularity of distros statistics. It's all based from clicks within their own website, so it's not a reliable metric technically speaking of how popular a distro is. Their stats aren't based off of how many downloads a distro gets either.

And in regards to their user reviews, while it's good to use reviews to see if something gets a lot of praise or has a lot of issues, one of DistroWatch's most reviewed distros for example is Manjaro with over 1k reviews. Arch the distro it's based on only has 300 reviews. But if you check the reddit communities, Manjaro has 54k users, while Arch has over 183k users. So depending where you look numbers could be up or down. So one might think Manjaro is the most popular (therefore the best) rolling release distro to use, but I'd argue that if you account a wider scope of things than just DistroWatch one would realize that Arch is by far the more popular rolling distro of the two.

And lastly, don't forget that many distros are created to serve a certain purpose(s). In Solu's case, it was created to serve the modern desktop world (not the incoming mobile world mind you). Solus wasn't created for servers. If you want something server related you'd want something like Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, etc. so not everyone is going to be attracted towards Solus, it all just depends on an individuals use case. For me, I want a stable rolling distro with an active community with developers that engage with the community and Solus ticks all those boxes for me.

At the end of the day, I think we owe it to ourselves to try as many distros as we can. We know when one feels just right. We know when we feel like we're at home and don't need to distro hop to infinity and beyond. Plus, this is all for free and all volunteer and all for the love of open source, so I do try to always be open minded and grateful when using something that took time, care, and dedication to create.

I'll end with this: Try not to rely so much on what things appear to be solely on DistroWatch, but broaden your scope of distro by how active they are, is their website actively maintained, how often do they put out releases, if they've had any (recent) controversies or not, how engaging is their community/forums/reddit/etc are, is their Github/Gitlab's active, and above all judge a distro after testing it out in a live environment via VirtualBox/Boxes/live USB and decide how it feels and if it meets your use cases. Good luck out there, use whatever works best for you, be it Solus or another distro, as long as it's Linux you can't really go wrong!