
GNU/Linux Distribution Timeline - chaimkut
http://futurist.se/gldt/wp-content/uploads/12.10/gldt1210.svg
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lamby
I maintain a specific timeline for Debian if anyone is interested:
[http://timeline.debian.net](http://timeline.debian.net)

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jojoo
That's great. Made me go back to to my early debian days with Potato CDs from
the bookstore and a translation of "Debian GNU/Linux: Guide to Installation
and Usage". I Could'nt update to woody because it was too costly over the
dialup line, so i bought the Woody CD set together with a Friend. Every time i
had to install something i had to walk to his house and get the CDs, or pay
lots of money (for me as a teenager at that time) to download the files.

Maybe you could add another Frame with Versions of Popular Packages? I'm
Thinking KDE, Gnome, GCC, mayor scripting Languages Browsers and Editors?

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lamby
> Maybe you could add another Frame with Versions of Popular Packages? I'm
> Thinking KDE, Gnome, GCC, mayor scripting Languages Browsers and Editors?

That's interesting - to give more context to particular eras? I can certainly
"place" myself in life when using GNOME 2.8 :)

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jojoo
yeah, to give more context. icons of the programs at that time would also be
great.

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sillysaurus3
I wish the dots were scaled by some metric indicating popularity. Such a
metric is hard to come up with. Maybe total number of commits.

Way awesome though.

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heinrich5991
You already see some kind of popularity – just count the number of forks.

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sdfjkl
Forks are also an indicator that people weren't happy with the origin.

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orkoden
It kind of depends on the forks. Many are just a different set of default
installed packages plus a new wallpaper.

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google-serf
This is beautiful. I'd like posters for my walls. Does anyone else know of
similar diagrams suitable for printing?

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ipedrazas
It's a nice svg so I guess you couold turn it into a PDF with a converter.

SVG to PDF in google?

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thiagoc
Outdated and misleading.

For instance, Korora is based on Fedora, not in Gentoo.

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tomich
This is awesome, reminds me of this pngs I've been saving for a while (don't
remember the source, but is probably written on the pngs somewhere)

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26820220/unix.png](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26820220/unix.png)

[https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26820220/windows.png](https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/26820220/windows.png)

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dtech
This is from 2012 and missing the (2012) part in the title...

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pwelch
Agreed. Two things that I know are out of date:

No SteamOS (Based off Debian)

Backtrack was rebuilt and is now Kali

I'm sure there is other stuff.

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donniezazen
Such a waste of time and manpower creating all these forks. I wish folks spent
time scratching their itch by writing great software for Linux instead of
trying to reinvent the same wheel. And yet folks will continue to fork
platform trying to solve problem that doesn't exist.

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bvk
A distro with enough options to satisfy the creators of every fork would be an
unholy mess. 1,000 separate contributors are very good at adding every option
under the sun to a piece of software. But reducing choices to the point where
you can just burn a CD and "install Debian" is anti-parallelizable.

~~~
donniezazen
I think 10 different distributions are fine. 1000 distributions are not.
Fedora is good for Gnome, Ubuntu is good for Unity, OpenSUSE is good for KDE,
Arch Linux is good for minimalism, etc. All these distributions are good at
something radically different which is fine but I want to use a different
theme, let's create a new distribution or some driver didn't work on my
system, so I am going to create a new distribution is hardly a valid reason.

For me freedom means two things (1) contribute to up stream project (2) write
free software.

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danieldk
The chart clearly shows that there is a lot of proliferation, which is
confusing to a lot of new users. Imagine what would be possible if all these
fine developers would focus on two or three distributions.

Ps. I am proud that I was a paid co-developer of the very first distribution
listed ;).

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jzelinskie
>Imagine what would be possible if all these fine developers would focus on
two or three distributions.

You don't think the lessons learned by those developers' experimentation
weren't shared and applied in the decision-making process for more prominent
distros? In a way, creating a distro is like contributing to all the other
distros at the same time. What makes them fine developers is their drive to
innovate and try new things so that one day the status quo can improve. Who
knows: if all those developers worked on the same few distributions, they may
have crashed and burned.

~~~
danieldk
_You don 't think the lessons learned by those developers' experimentation
weren't shared and applied in the decision-making process for more prominent
distros?_

Sometimes. But there is also a lot of 'let's take Ubuntu and change the
default desktop/wallpaper/DVD package set/...'.

Also, it's not as if developers in major distributions such as Debian don't
have room to experiment with different approaches. For instance, in Debian,
the default init system discussion rages. The most promising candidates are
already available in Debian itself.

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davidgerard
I put this chart as the example on
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_forks](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_software_forks)

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ThinkBeat
What tool was used to create this graph? Does anyone know?

I often find the need to create such a diagram.

I am hoping the answer is not Photoshop.

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Gormo
The comments in the SVG file indicate that it was made with Gnuclad:
[https://launchpad.net/gnuclad](https://launchpad.net/gnuclad).

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lmm
Wasn't RedHat originally a Slackware derivative?

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phpnode
What about all the distributions that don't include GNU, or those that only
include a tiny proportion of GNU code, is there a chart that includes those?

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sparkie
They don't actually exist - it's just hot air from the anti-GNU crowd.

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nailer
Android doesn't have glibc, and it's the most popular consumer computing
platform.

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Gormo
It's the most popular platform for mobile devices; the most popular consumer
computing platform is still Windows.

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nailer
Got any links for that? Everything I've read for the last couple of years says
mobile/tablet has overtaken desktop dramatically.

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Gormo
What have you been looking at: sales figures or install base numbers?

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nailer
Usage on consumer web.

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Gormo
Link? Stats linked elsewhere in this thread show Windows ash having about a
45% share of useragents visiting Wikipedia, with iOS having less than half
that.

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NAFV_P
I couldn't find kylin linux.

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callesgg
Cool :)

Where does the source data come from?

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a1a
The same one:
[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_T...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Linux_Distribution_Timeline.svg)

Not able to find source though. Anyone?

Edit: More info [http://futurist.se/gldt/](http://futurist.se/gldt/), still no
source though.

~~~
claudius
The tar.bz there has a CSV file which looks pretty sourcy to me.

