About

DistroCompare is a reference site about Linux and BSD distributions, built for people choosing a system rather than maintaining one. Twenty distributions have a card of their own: what the system is, who develops it, how it is released, what it ships in its most recent snapshot and what hardware it asks for. Forty comparison pages take two cards and work through five subjects: base and packages, desktop and display, release model, hardware requirements, and init with immutability. Every figure comes from one dataset assembled from release announcements, official package lists and installation guides. That dataset also records the dates and kernel versions of past releases, which is why a page can say that one system shipped kernel 6.14 in April 2025 and another 7.2 in October 2025. Where the dataset has no value for a field, the page leaves the subject out instead of filling the gap with an estimate. No distribution is rated, scored or ranked first; each comparison ends with the situations in which a reader would pick one side or the other.

Reference data for this site is compiled and maintained by the linux2u.ru team — a Russian-language Linux and BSD release archive running since 2010.