Linux Distro Tier List

Debian Project. Still developed

Ian Murdock’s community distribution, built around apt and a free-software social contract. The largest family tree in Linux grows from it.

Canonical. Still developed

Debian’s unstable branch, polished into a release every six months with an LTS every two years. More distributions build on it than on anything but Debian.

Red Hat. Retired

The boxed distribution that introduced the RPM package format. Red Hat ended it in 2004, splitting the work into the free Fedora and the paid Enterprise Linux.

Fedora Project. Still developed

Red Hat’s community upstream, with a release every six months and a habit of adopting new plumbing like systemd, Wayland, and PipeWire early.

Red Hat. Still developed

Each major version branches from Fedora about every three years and is previewed in CentOS Stream. Every RHEL-compatible rebuild copies it.

Mandrakesoft. Retired

Started as Red Hat Linux with KDE added, and made Linux friendlier with a graphical installer and control center.

Mageia.Org. Still developed

A community fork started by former Mandriva developers after the company let them go.

Peter MacDonald. Retired

Softlanding Linux System, one of the first distributions to ship the kernel, GNU tools, and the X Window System together, on a stack of floppy disks.

Patrick Volkerding. Still developed

The oldest distribution still maintained, known for staying close to upstream and to classic Unix habits.

SUSE & openSUSE Project. Still developed

Began as a German edition of Slackware, then built its own RPM base with YaST, zypper, and Btrfs snapshots.

Per Lidén. Still developed

A lean, BSD-style, source-based distribution for experienced users, with ports and plain shell scripts.

Arch Linux team. Still developed

Judd Vinet’s rolling distribution built on simplicity, pacman, and the Arch Wiki, with the AUR for everything else.

Gentoo Foundation. Still developed

Daniel Robbins’ Enoch Linux, renamed Gentoo, builds everything from source with Portage and USE flags, so each install is tuned to its hardware.

Google. Still developed

The open-source base of ChromeOS, assembled with Gentoo’s Portage tooling and shipped as signed, read-only images.

CoreOS, then Kinvolk. Still developed

A minimal, self-updating container host that started immutable server Linux. Red Hat retired CoreOS’s original in 2020; the Flatcar fork carries it on.

Eelco Dolstra & NixOS Foundation. Still developed

A purely functional package manager from a PhD thesis. The whole system is built from one declarative configuration and can roll back.

GNU Project. Still developed

GNU’s take on the Nix model, configured in Guile Scheme, with only free software in the main channel.

Natanael Copa. Still developed

A tiny, security-minded base built on musl libc and BusyBox, and a favorite base image for containers.

Juan Romero Pardines. Still developed

An independent rolling distribution with its own xbps package manager and runit instead of systemd.

Barry Kauler. Still developed

Small live systems that load entirely into RAM, assembled from other distributions’ packages with the Woof-CE toolkit.

Various. Still developed

Distributions with a package base of their own: some old, some new, and several built for one job like routers, media centers, or Kubernetes.