 What are the most popular Linux desktop distributions? Well, if you think of it in terms of people that use those distributions or use distributions based on those distributions, probably the two most popular Linux distributions on the planet are Debian and Arch. I guarantee you, you guys that are watching this, if you're a Linux user, 90% plus of you guys watching this video right now, if you're on a Linux distribution or probably running a Debian based distribution or an Arch based distribution. The reason you're doing this is because Debian and Arch really spotlight one of the biggest failures as far as Linux gaining widespread mass adoption on the desktop. What is that biggest failure? Well, one word, package management. People run Debian and Arch because they can get all the software they want. Right. That's the number one answer people give for why they run Debian and Arch is software availability, especially with Arch users. When you ask anyone that runs Arch or an Arch based Linux distribution, typically one of the number one answers they give you, the AUR, the Arch user repositories, because it's got so much software in there and they don't have to go and grab third party packages anywhere for software. They can get all of their software either from the standard Arch repository or from the AUR. They don't have to go grab anything as far as snaps, flat packs, app images. They don't have to turn to any programming language specific package managers like Pip and Jim and Cabal and all of that stuff. They don't have to go and compile anything from source. They don't have to go grab source code and actually build a package themselves. And that's fantastic because if you're not running a Debian based or an Arch based distribution, software availability can be a really big issue. There are some distributions I've tried that have horrible repositories. As far as many of the programs I use on a daily basis just aren't there. They're not in the repository. If I had to spotlight one particular distribution as being one of the worst as far as software availability, Solus, Solus has a lot going for it. Solus is a kind of a rolling release distribution. It's not bleeding edge rolling like Arch or Gen2, but it's a rolling distribution and it looks good. The budgie desktop on it just looks gorgeous. And then you go and try to install, you know, all your favorite programs and half of the stuff that you want is not in the Solus repositories. And I'm not even kidding. I've tried. I've actually installed Solus and ran Solus on my previous main production machine very briefly one time. I also have run Solus many times on my laptops. It's a fine distribution other than their repositories are just woefully lacking. And I think really just package management, all the package management systems for Linux, they kind of suck, right? It's really what holds us back is we've got people. We don't have enough people packaging the software, but really we probably would have enough package maintainers if Linux could just come to some kind of agreement as far as standards. If all these distributions we have way too many package managers already and people keep creating more and I don't understand why. So let's be honest here. Let's let's talk real talk when we talk about Linux on the desktop. Ubuntu is King Ubuntu probably has 80 90 percent of the market share when we talk about who's running what as far as Linux on the desktop. And if they're not running Ubuntu or Ubuntu based distros and Debian and Debian based distros, which are very similar Debian and Ubuntu both use the same package manager app, both the same packaging format, Deb packs. So why doesn't everybody just adopt Deb packages, Debian packages, the dot Deb format? Well, why don't we all use that? That seems like that would be the smart thing to do. And so many packages are already available. It has Deb packs like that would instantly fix so many, especially if the smaller Linux distributions, the independent distributions that are doing their own thing and they can't really get all the stuff package that they want to get packaged. Well, if you just designed your distro to actually use Deb packages, it solves everything. There was actually a movement many years back where people wanted to create some standards. It was called the I think it was called the Linux standards base where we were going to solve this package management problem. We were all going to get together as far as Linux distributions and agree on one package manager, one packaging format. The problem with that is again, I've already told you probably 80 to 90 percent of the people out there running Debian or Ubuntu based distributions. Everybody's already packaging for the Deb format. Most especially proprietary software, you know, people outside the open source community, you know, companies like Microsoft and you know, all those kinds of companies. If they're creating Linux software, what are they packaging it as? It's usually a dot Deb and so that makes the biggest sense. But this Linux standards base, I guess, had a lot of influence from Red Hat. I think Red Hat actually created the Linux standards base because they're like, yeah, we're all going to, you know, center around RPM as far as package management. Everybody's just going to do RPM. Yeah, great. So like literally probably less than 5 percent of people that run desktop Linux use a distribution that uses the RPM format. That's the one we're going to center around. We're not going to center around the one that 90 percent of the Linux desktop market shares using, which is Debian. We're going to go completely other direction. So the Linux standards base became a complete joke almost from day one when it was founded. As soon as they decided, OK, we're going to do a one package manager and it's going to be RPM, nobody listened. And then, you know, nowadays, we have these other package formats like Snap and Flat Pack and App Image, speaking of Red Hat. You know, they created Flat Pack. A lot of people are critical of Flat Packs. A lot of people are critical of Snaps because that was created by a corporation canonical and then App Image. A lot of people are critical of App Image, even though no company is behind it, they're critical of App Image for security reasons and this and that. And it's usually fanboyism, right? You can't be a fan of Snaps, Flat Packs and App Image. You've got to pick one and you've got to be on that team and you've got to trash the others. And then you've got this situation where Snaps only work with System D until recently, Flat Pack used to only work if you had System D installed. But again, Red Hat is behind System D development and Flat Pack development. So they kind of tied it all in. They eventually got rid of the System D requirement for Flat Pack, thankfully, canonical still needs to do that with Snaps. Right now, Snaps still won't work on any distribution that doesn't have System D installed. It's a hard requirement. And then you've got, you know, some really different kinds of distributions out there like GNU Geeks, which I've done some videos on here recently. Snaps wouldn't work on it because there's no System D in GNU Geeks. App Images wouldn't work in GNU Geeks for some reason. I don't think there's any way to make an App Image work in Geeks. Flat Packs maybe or maybe not will work, maybe depending on the package. But pretty much all three formats. App Image, Flat Pack, Snaps, if you're on GNU Geeks, you're probably not using those. Again, it just highlights the mess that is package management and software availability on desktop Linux and Snaps. I think Snaps could solve a lot of these problems because I like a lot of things about Snaps. They're pretty simple to package up. I did a video a while back, did a collaborative video with Big Pod and we, you know, snapped something on camera. But the problem with Snaps and what's really holding Snaps back is a lot of people don't trust Canonical and the back end for Snaps. Some of that stuff is still not open source. So you don't see like you don't see another Snaps store other than the one Canonical runs. Now, you could create another Snaps store, but nobody does it. And the reason nobody does it is even if you created your own snap repository, still some of the stuff that you have to use to maintain those Snaps and that repository are Canonical stuff. And you have some of the closed source stuff. You're still tied to Canonical. And until you can sever those ties where, you know, I can have my own Linux distro and I can maintain my own repositories of snap packages and I'm not tied in any way to Canonical until well, that's a possibility. I don't think Snaps will ever see the kind of adoption they need to actually succeed. I think the best packaging format, the best system of package management I've seen any Linux distribution do is Arch, especially the way Arch packages are handled and built and you are the fact that you have a community repository that anybody can submit anything to, I think is fantastic. I think it is the best model we have out there as far as desktop Linux and package management, but the AUR has some serious issues too. You got a lot of broken packages in the AUR and a lot of people have security concerns about what's packaged in the AUR. I mean, I think the AUR again is the best thing we have going. But if I was going to grade the AUR on a scale of one to 10 as far as one being complete garbage and 10 being a perfect package management system, AUR is like a five, maybe a six. Right. And that's the best one we have. You know, some of the other package formats I discussed earlier wouldn't even receive that kind of score. I think the biggest problem here, though, is choice, right? Because in free and open source software, you can do anything. You can create your own package format and your own piece of software, your own distribution. You can fork this and fork that and go off and do your own thing. And we have too many people doing their own thing sometimes. Why do we need so many different package formats? Because when you think about it, a packaging system is just, hey, tell me how to go get the source code for this package and build it. Basically, I mean, that's basically what an arch package is. And especially the AUR package is typically, you know, there's a list of commands, hey, go get this from this particular GitHub or get lab repository, run these commands to build it. Boom, you're done. Why do we need 37 different methods of, you know, handling this package management problem? I think some people, you know, when they get into free and open source software and developing software and learning programming and things like that, they want to just start working on something. And sometimes these people just want to reinvent the wheel. Right. I guess they can't find anything unique. I'm just going to reinvent the wheel. I'm going to start this. I'm going to start that. You know, we got people creating package formats. We don't need all kinds of programs we don't need. We got people creating a knit systems that we don't need or the new knit systems keep cropping up like, guys, we don't need, you know, more package formats, you know, quit creating more package formats, quit creating all those a knit systems. It's like, if we quit working on things that we don't even need. Maybe we could get people focusing on stuff that actually does matter. Can we get a proper display server that works on Linux? Right. Can we have all those people that are just trying to reinvent the wheel? Can those people go work on Wayland? Right. How about the sound server? Can we get people to actually go fix pulse audio or pulse audio is beyond fixing, you know, work on a pipe wire, whatever the next big thing is going to be. Ultimately, if you're a main dev of a small Linux distribution and you're wondering why your distribution is small and why you can't gain traction and gain users, guys, take a look at your software availability. Take a look at the package manager you're using and then take a look at what Arch is doing, by the way. Before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank Michael, Gabe, Nate, Corbinian, Mitchell, entropy, UK, John, Devon, Fran, Arch 55, 30, Chris, Chuck, DJ, Donnie, Dylan, George, Louis, I'm Repaul, Robert, Sean, Tobias, and Willie. These guys, they are the producers of this episode. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these ladies and gentlemen. These are all my supporters over on Patreon because this channel is supported by you guys, the community. If you'd like to support my work, you'll find DT over on Patreon. All right, guys, peace.