
GNU/Linux distro timeline (svg) - kqr2
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9a/Gldt1009.svg
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cookiecaper
That's a pretty awesome SVG; the titles are links to distro sites, it's
attractive and readable, and SVG makes it easy to Ctrl+F. I am happy to the
author of that file. Thanks for sharing it here.

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_delirium
They've open-sourced the code they used to generate it as a general-purpose
cladogram generator: <https://launchpad.net/gnuclad>

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wyclif
I took one look at this, especially the Debian branch, and immediately felt
_old_.

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jacobolus
There’s probably no way to easily gather the data, but it’d be very
interesting to see this same chart with the number of active contributors (or
some proxy like number of committers/patch authors within the previous month)
to each project represented by the width of the line. It would give a better
idea of which branches are serious and invested in and which are one-man hobby
projects, which ones are growing fast and which are dying, etc.

~~~
rbanffy
It's further complicated because of upstream development (everyone benefits
from Red Hat's kernel updates, CentOS benefits from pretty much everything Red
Hat does), as well as dowstream bug collection and triage (Debian benefits
from Ubuntu's installed base).

Current models do not exactly apply.

~~~
jacobolus
Another interesting parameter to look at would be number of users. Comparing
number of active developers (for each project specifically) with number of
users would give a pretty good idea of which projects were benefitting from
upstream development and which were serving as backbones for downstream user-
oriented projects.

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tygorius
It's an impressive effort, although it's missing the first Linux I regularly
used: Tom Oehser's tomsrtbt (<http://www.toms.net/rb/>), a single-floppy
release aimed at system rescue.

Highlighting the lineage aspect, however, loses useful context information.
For example, Robert Shingledecker was a significant part of the development of
Damn Small Linux for five years before he started the Tiny Core Linux project.
While there's no commonality in the distribution-specific code that I'm aware
of, and hence no reason for a graphic connection on the chart, I think it's
safe to say that Tiny Core's design is a continuation of Shingledecker's
thinking on what makes a good minimal Linux.

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Typhon
Impressive.

It's interesting to see that most distros are descended from either Debian,
Slackware or Red Hat. I guess that trying to improve what already exists is
less work than starting one from scratch.

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AdamGibbins
Wikipedia page on SLS states: "Similarly Ian Murdock's frustration with SLS
led him to create the Debian project".

Slackware originated from SLS. So strictly speaking SLS and Red Hat appear to
be the two originating distro's from others have decended in one way or
another.

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boundlessdreamz
Brought back some good memories..of visiting distrowatch.. compiling custom
kernels..swearing at KDE/GNome for being too slow and using fvwm..moving from
xine to mplayer..

I used linux for 5 years and used redhat in 2001, gentoo for a brief time,
slackware for 2 years, fedora for a year, back to windows for 1 year and now
I'm a happy OS X user for 3+ years.

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riobard
Not sure if I'm going to get downvoted for my dislike of the fragmentation,
but I've been always wondering what if all the efforts could be somehow
combined to make a really great one...

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nooneelse
There are many, sometimes very different measures of what "a great one" does
and would mean for an OS, as I'm sure you know. And therein lies the beauty of
having rich diversity to choose from.

I can sympathize with the irritation of seeing duplication of effort. But when
that irritation pushes a mind toward the tempting presupposition of some
single measure of goodness which could have been a guiding light the whole
time, paring away effort duplication and dead-ends... well, the thinking has
gone a bit absurd.

    
    
       There are many regions of possible-OS space, not everyone needs or wants to be in the same one.

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planckscnst
The chart shows Edubuntu fading off, but the project is still alive and
strong: <http://edubuntu.org/>

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jonhohle
The best part of that was learning about gnuclad. I've been looking for a
timeline generator for the past few weeks.

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jrockway
I never knew there were so many Linux distros whose names referenced
_Cryptonomicon_.

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virtualritz
Misses <http://www.exherbo.org/>

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tyrmored
yeah and Hannah Montana Linux

<http://hannahmontana.sourceforge.net/Site/Home.html>

