They cheat to fuel their donate button. Meanwhile Debian maintainers do most of the work.
this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2025
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Distrowatch popularity is a pointless metric. IIRC they measure clicks on their own site as popularity. That means that people that just want to check out that distro near the top that they never heard of actually ensure that it stays near the top.
This is true. I'm pretty sure they acknowledge this transparently.
It's helpful to hilight the common distro's but it's not an endorsement.
True as well
Distrowatch ranking is just the distros that are more commonly searched on the site. The FAQ says "The page Hit Ranking represents hits per day by unique visitors". It's just an attempt to see what's more popular among visitors.
Yeah, maybe there is a feedback loop where people will click on the top one just to see why it is on top, and in doing so they give the clicks necessary to remain on the top.
MX has become my go-to for low-power, outdated computers.
It runs on a toaster. It installs on 64-bit systems with 32-bit EFI. The base install supports touchscreens. It fits on a 16GB SSD with room to spare. 2GB RAM is plenty. It has an active development community.
If your computer is less 5 years old, there are better options. But if you're trying to keep a Chromebook out of the junk yard, MX is a good choice.
Oh, now come on… 5 years is hardly where a system becomes “old.” It’s 2025 right now. Using a system made in 2020 hardly differs at all from one made yesterday. I’d say a cutoff for considering slim distros would be more like ten years ago. I’ve got some systems that are older than that even and they blaze. Only a few things really put that kind of thing to the test: games and heavy graphics editing. Am I wrong?
I only really begin to feel a computer is too old for complicated tasks at around 15 years I think
Even at that age, some computers can do plenty.
I built my "old" gaming desktop in 2009. It currently runs Linux with Plasma. I still use it to do 3D modeling for 3D printing.
The issue ends up being a hardware limitation. I can't quite recall the specific issue but there was some sort of encoding thing on the CPU that prevented me from using most apps without severe performance issues. Of course browsing and so on was fine. I ended up using it as a server for some time (20 Years old at this point) and the energy costs were bad enough that I decided to put it to rest. Its now part of my own little museum of old ass computers that I let guests use for mostly for viewing pdfs and boardgame rules. I tell my family to ship me their old laptops and stuff I got like 15 of them at this point, and I have in fact used all 15 of them simultaneously when I invite a lot of nerds over. Most of them are running Fedora Atomic, a couple are running MX Linux, Alpine, and Damn Small Linux. I intend on going through the small distros at some point and do a comparison
Indeed! It depends what you’re doing on it. Because there’s a wealth of computer activities that have not increased in actual power demand in decades. Sure they keep making software more bloated to keep the need up, but if you throw an efficient distro on a machine and only need it for basic office type things like office suites, email etc. and even basic graphics editing, you can use a 25 year old machine and do just fine. It will run, and it will do the job well, and you’re never going to feel like it’s slow. Maybe not as glitzy as newer ones, but that is where you’re already beyond need and into want.
The only things that are tricky are internet connections with anything using web protocols, due to certificate tech etc. and that can be handled by using a still-maintained browser such as a Firefox fork, and email can be done via software like Thunderbird, which doesn’t have to render the bloated front-ends of many email providers.
I was just tossing out a random number based on a bunch of posts I've seen. Don't overthink it. :)
Heh. Yeah I get it. Just giving you grief ;)
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Yes and yes, hits to the page drive it up that list. It’s a fine Debian reskin, nothing special.
It's not just a reskin, the MX tools are really useful for beginners and non-technical people.
I’ll defer to you on that, when I got to trying it those weren’t tools I was looking for.
Wonderful. May it live in this fame forever 🫡
Likely there is a combination of factors:
First, as MX is catered mostly for a bit aged computers, it is likely the demographics of users are a bit more aged that other distros like CachyOS (which by the way, it is now in the crest of a wave, signaling Distrowatch ranking is not correlated with market share.)
Also, the fact that many of us are pondering about MX's high ranking, we are also clinking on it more that we would on Ubuntu or Mint so feeding the impressions count.
Similarly, when a post like this is brought up, a bunch of use go to Distrowatch and click on it to see info about MX.
Also a regional popularity must be at place... distrowatch probably is more prevalent is certain countries that MX is favored. I don't see many in Asia using MX for instance, so western distrowatch distorts its global popularity. For instance if 3 users in the US use Mint and 3 MX but in China, that they barely go to distrowatch, 3 use Mint and 0 MX, distrowach would rank globally MX and Mint as same while in reality, Mint is clearly in top globally.
Of course, it is also likely MX developers have a bit of incentive of clicking on Distrowatch for their baby... I don't find it particularly too bad since many developers are doing far worse things... Using bots and dozens of different IPs would trespass the ethical boundaries for me though! MX is not the only ones that could potentially be doing this... it is not possible that Arch or Kubuntu are raked way bellow Q4OS, Lite, or Bluestar for instance. I see some artifacts among top famed distros too. It reminds me of the VW diesel scandal... VW was cheeting, but all other car makers were manipulating in one way or another their emissions too, it is just that US found it convenient to go for the foreign low hanging fruit.
Best thing is for us to stop reading those rankings as anything more than distros that trend up and down and that is it. I categorize all distros we all hear about, from MX to Cachy, from Nobara to deepin all as equally competitive and the difference just catered to the needs of different users. The more unwarranted credit we give to these rankings, the more incentive we are given to manipulations.
I tried MX a few times on different machines maybe a few weeks/months apart. Every time I did because of it being up there at the top and I was like “What am I not seeing?” It’s a decent distro, yeah, but some of the customization is distracting to be honest. I can say it’s good but the top? For what… more than a year or two even, it’s been in the top few.
I just don’t get it.
I installed MX on an old Acer tablet/laptop Hybrid. It's one of the few that would run due to its 32bit bootloader but 64bit system. It works fine, but I wasn't blown away either.
I’ve found two distros I enjoy on really old stuff: Bodhi and Q4. They run fairly well and for the footprint, they’re pretty feature-rich. I love the Moshka desktop on Bodhi.
I've been wondering the same for a couple of years now. I tried it once, and it's garbage. I never hear about it in forums, YouTube, Mastodon, Lemmy or any other place, but they are always top 10. WTF? 🤣
From what I understand about distrowatch is that their "ranking" system is based on how many people (or bots) visit a distros page.
I've been using it for a few years on my gaming desktop and I couldn't be happier about it, it's the distro that stopped my distro-hopping.
I think there is no ranking site that can be 100% trusted.
That said, I trust linux-hardware.org a bit more than distro watch, even if it's not as popular, because you have to intentionally download an app/script for it to scan and upload your distro/hardware data (so no page clicks or just traffic, you must have the distro installed), and if you repeatedly try to upload the same distro/hardware data, it doesn't count multiple uploads on its statistics, if they are not at least a month apart.
Edit: and even on linux-hardware you have strange results like OpenMandriva and ROSA as Distros on top 15, and I have never heard of them outside there, and from what I can find they are somewhat popular in Russia and some parts of Europe
and even on linux-hardware you have strange results like OpenMandriva and ROSA as Distros on top 15, and I have never heard of them outside there
As you have said they are REALLY popular in russia, and that alone makes a great ammount of people, specially since they still support i386 and older architectures with full support, thats why ALT linux is also really popular.
But that just tells you all the people that have visited the site and downloaded a script.
I find it hard to believe that OpenMandriva is the most popular distro. I distrohop quite a bit and never even came across it (currently using Nobora on my PC, KDE Neon in the living room, tumbleweed on the kids laptops (though I may move them to silverblue or another immutable), and Pop on my laptop. It takes me a minute when I sit at any console to remember which package manager is the right one)
If you want honest results of actual use on general-purpose PCs...I'd wish for something like Alexa Page Rankings that could get deep enough to know Distro, but that's not possible (I don't think, without every distro having its own User Agent signature in the browsers), and Amazon bought Alexa and discontinued those services
As I said on the first line, no ranking of any kind can be trusted 100%, I pointed out an alternative to distrowatch, and why I would trust it a bit more, not saying I really trust it, or that I believe every result.
It is less popular so it could be a case like OpenMandriva has it integrated to upload automatically for all its users by default, or they found another way to game that ranking.
When I see any ranking, I do research when I see a distro that is suspiciously positioned, and I haven't heard about outside the place I saw it referenced, and even so I always stick to mainline distros.
Honest results would need a standard way that every distro adopts and make an opt-out (not opt-in) regular upload thing similar to what linux-hardware.org does, and be actively trying to mitigate or deny certain distros or specific actors from tampering with the results, and we don't have that.
Page rankings, clicks, scripts, etc. are not enough if every device doesn't ping it in a legitimate way (fake user agent or other means), and there is always the case of people that will opt-out or block this as they don't want to be tracked.
On your point of something like Alexa Page Rankings, the thing I would add is that, at least for me, if it is a ranking shown by a corporation, it is not trustworthy.
Oh for sure, but at least Alexa's rankings were rather transparent and somewhat trusted built up on a reputation.
I hadn't even realized Amazon bought and discontinued the service, but that's clearly exactly the type of instance that needs to be guarded against. I'm sure that a big part of why Amazon wanted that Alexa gone was because it would show rising competition, and Jeff can't have that.
Distrowatch has been gamed for years.
I rarely see any references to MX in Linux forums, I don't think it's anywhere near as popular as DW would indicate.
Apparently my experiance has been the outlier here but I've seen a ton of MX talk in the last year. Even to the point of it being somewhat commonly recommended alongside mint for beginners but on older hardware
I rarely see any references to MX in Linux forums
That could be a testament to it's reliability.
This is now my head cannon.
If you say so. MX is a Debian base, so it's more a testament to Debian's reliability.
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I used MX for a couple of years and it was a solid and perfectly usable distro, if you don't want the latest packages.
It is now official. Netcraft has confirmed: Distrowatch is dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Distrowatch community [...]
MX Linux was botted due to the amount of hits.
My producer, Neigsendoig, did a video here where he covered MX 23.
I tried MX Linux recently because of that.
It's nice but not my style. Specially the systemd thing. Trying to support both with and without with somehow more emphasis in "without" systemd.
But it works quite good as a OS in a pendrive thingy. I has good default tools for that.
I used MX Linux all of 2024 because I had previously installed antiX on an old netbook and I really liked the tools it came with that meant I didn't have to touch the console too much, and MX Linux is a sister project based on antiX sharing the same custom utilities.
And I have no clue why it rose to the top of distrowatch, but once it was there it stayed there because people click the top distros on the list in the sidebar, which in turn gives it clicks making it stay on top.
I do still believe it's a good starter distro, it's just that once you get a bit more comfortable with linux the old Debian packages become more and more annoying.
I am sure it will creep back up once the MX 25 has been released with Debian 13 on 9th August.
https://mxlinux.org/blog/changes-coming-with-mx-25/
Optional distro downloads for Systemd or sysVinit.
use Mx-Linux on my old T450 laptop.
works great for my needs.
I use MX since years. I did distrohopping before, started by Manjaro then Mint, NixOS, MX, Alpine... One day Archlabs, my distro at the time, was closed, I had to switch quickly and MX was an obvious choice because I can have a nice Xfce setup out of the box and it was the most reliable of all distro I tried without being a fork of a fork like Mint. One day I asked about a package update on the forum, and a maintainer quickly answered me that it shouldnt be a problem and the package was added in some test repo. MX is not a scam, I dont know why this distro dont make noise on the classic linux places, maybe because Mint took the place of the easy beginner distro ? Or also the average MX prefer to use its computer to do stuff, than talking about his OS on the internet 😆
MX is a nice distro. However, it is also true that it is just Debian with XFCE, KDE, or Fluxbox on top.
Your comment about not “being a fork of a fork” is ironic. MX Linux is a fork of AntiX which is a fork of Debian.
This is a not a criticism of MX. I love EndeavourOS and it is just Arch with a different installer and some sensible defaults. But I can also understand why some people look at MX and wonder why they don’t just install Debian with XFCE directly.
MX is a new name for Mepis. Part of MX and AntiX contributors are the same persons. MX got kernel compiled by AntiX, that particularily suits old hardware. Also the Xfce setup is more modern comparing to the default provided by Debian.
I am using Linux since the 90s, used Ubuntu a lot at one time, then started using MX linux, 16.1 iirc was my first install. Then I continue to use it, I have always like Xfce (coming from mwm and such), and no systemd, no snap, no flatpak etc. MX is very stable, use the latest package in .deb format. I am using it for almost 10 years now, 24/7, I am using it as my work PC too.
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