Linux distro popularity? Thread

Which Linux distros are most popular with Desura users? The Linux deployment landscape is pretty fragmented and it would be good to know where an indie game developer should put the most development energy. Does Desura publicly track OS usage statistics? If it doesn't, it should. Steam tracks various OS usage statistics, and that was useful back when everyone was wondering whether Vista was worth bothering with yet or not, or DX9 vs. DX10 / DX11.

Well you can see the stats for OS usage here Indiedb.com but we do not have any live stats on acutal distros of linux. However you should focus on ubuntu first and foremost (not a linux user here).

Seen quite a few people using Ubuntu, Arch Linux and Fedora. Gentoo too.

Mint here.

DistroWatch keeps a list of distro popularity based on average amount of webpage hits. Not the most accurate method, since many experienced users visit the sites only to download a new release, but it's better than nothing.

Linux Mint 14 KDE

Ubuntu is rather popular with novice people. It's though everything else but the golden apple of Linux distributions and tends to introduce fuck-ups to FHS and what not else. GenToo or alike are more found on the experienced to power users. Myself I use both (Kubuntu to be precise... Gnome sucks... although KDE is not safe of fail itself... see the PIM debacle going on since years). If you can work with Ubuntu you are rather safe. If you get it working with that fucked up distro the rest should be less of a problem.

I certainly would never recommend that anyone 'focus' on Ubuntu, there is already far too much of that going on. The problem with Ubuntu is that Canonical really doesn't seem to care about Linux standards or compatibility. They take Debian's packages, modify them, repackage them into Ubuntu and don't even maintain compatibility with Debian in many cases.

I personally use openSUSE which is superior to Ubuntu in every way, in my opinion. However, rather than focusing on a single distro, the best advice I can give is to not focus on any one distro at all. Either target multiple distros or aim for distro neutral solutions.

linux mint (mate) here. I am a windows user who hates not like win 8.

I think it's ubuntu,Fedora and Linux mint jugding what there site says.

Edited by: IsThatMithril

Ubuntu or some other Ubuntu-based distro (Xubuntu, Mint, etc.). I personally use Xubuntu for my laptop while I retain Windows 7 on my desktop because I just happen to like Visual Studio 2012 Pro. If there was an equally good IDE running on Linux I would probably choose something along the lines of Kubuntu. I would have Kubuntu on my laptop but I don't know how KDE will run on this older machine.

KDE has KDevelop. Not sure what kind of features you expect from it but that's the IDE I'm working with. Otherwise there exist the usual suspects like Eclipse, Code::Blocks and company.