This happened in the last 30 days, which will be part of the explanation:
There is a new version of MX Linux (21 based on Debian 11 Bullseye) due very soon, so MX may regain its position on top, at least for a while.
As Iâve previously mentioned elsewhere on the forum, each time a Linux Distro releases a new ISO it generates some interest so people who follow Distrowatch tend to click on that Distro to see the new version. This means it will go up in the rankings. After a while it will go down again. These rankings have very little to do with how many people are actually using a particular Distro. Itâs a good website to explore what is available but nothing to get too excited about really.
I suppose it is a measure of engagement but not actual installations.
Interesting Steam stats for AugustâŚ
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In the tag âlast 6 monthsâ, endeavour is in second position.
Overview of last 1 month, 3 months etc in one page
Reddit, Youtube, other distro forums Iâve seen. I can tell it is getting alot of attention even if I canât quantify how much. Great stuff!
Distrowatch just measures the clicks on their page, nothing else. This has nothing to do with actual numbers of users.
Every time there is a new ISO, people talk about it and then, for some reason Iâll never understand, people have the need to look up the distro on Distrowatch.
Forum is stable on around 10.000 logged in users every day:
Now I bet if compare to say 3 months agoâŚdifference must be large
Is that the number of total logins per day and not the total number of users having logged in?
I mean, as of writing, the forum has 3243 users.
10,000? Thatâs an arena, or perhaps half of a football stadium, thatâs great! 
yes user-logins it will be 
it is also the âpageviews categoryâ
And all these numbers are only numbers⌠they say nothing about who uses EndeavourOS as a daily driver in the real worldâŚ
Thatâs right!
Thanks for the explanation!
In the real world I wake up in the morning, put the kettle on and make a mug of tea. While this is brewing I login to my desktop computer and guess what? It runs EndeavourOS and it is my daily driver. If I take a laptop out with me it is also running EndeavourOS. Also I do not dual-boot.
To be totally open and honest I also have a desktop computer running Arch (btw 
) but that is my experimental machine. Also I have 2 old MacBooks running their native OS, but the last time I powered one of those up was about 4 months ago. They have a few applications which I still find useful.
ahh youâre totally in the ecosystem I see. A person of culture!
Distrowatch âpopularityâ does this to every distro as popularity numbers go up⌠TBH distrowatch is âat bestâ a click popularity contest from their site to quote their site:
[it is ] a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website [âŚ]
. It is NOT an indicator of distro importance/ use/ spread. If it was then Ubuntu, Red Hat, debian would be at the top of the heap.
It is simply a nice âfeel-goodâ number.
Yes, there may indeed be jumps on the list when new releases appear, which is why it is worth looking at the trends in the annual or semi-annual rankings.
Indeed, it is more of a page visit list, but it can show trends on a larger scale over time. There is no adequate data on the number of users of linux distributions.