GNU/Linux distro timeline (svg)

That's a pretty awesome SVG; the titles are links to distro sites, it's attractive and readable, and SVG makes it easy to Ctrl+F. I am happy to the author of that file. Thanks for sharing it here.

I took one look at this, especially the Debian branch, and immediately felt old.

There’s probably no way to easily gather the data, but it’d be very interesting to see this same chart with the number of active contributors (or some proxy like number of committers/patch authors within the previous month) to each project represented by the width of the line. It would give a better idea of which branches are serious and invested in and which are one-man hobby projects, which ones are growing fast and which are dying, etc.

It's an impressive effort, although it's missing the first Linux I regularly used: Tom Oehser's tomsrtbt (http://www.toms.net/rb/), a single-floppy release aimed at system rescue.

Highlighting the lineage aspect, however, loses useful context information. For example, Robert Shingledecker was a significant part of the development of Damn Small Linux for five years before he started the Tiny Core Linux project. While there's no commonality in the distribution-specific code that I'm aware of, and hence no reason for a graphic connection on the chart, I think it's safe to say that Tiny Core's design is a continuation of Shingledecker's thinking on what makes a good minimal Linux.

Impressive.

It's interesting to see that most distros are descended from either Debian, Slackware or Red Hat. I guess that trying to improve what already exists is less work than starting one from scratch.

Brought back some good memories..of visiting distrowatch.. compiling custom kernels..swearing at KDE/GNome for being too slow and using fvwm..moving from xine to mplayer..

I used linux for 5 years and used redhat in 2001, gentoo for a brief time, slackware for 2 years, fedora for a year, back to windows for 1 year and now I'm a happy OS X user for 3+ years.

Not sure if I'm going to get downvoted for my dislike of the fragmentation, but I've been always wondering what if all the efforts could be somehow combined to make a really great one...

The chart shows Edubuntu fading off, but the project is still alive and strong: http://edubuntu.org/

The best part of that was learning about gnuclad. I've been looking for a timeline generator for the past few weeks.

I never knew there were so many Linux distros whose names referenced Cryptonomicon.

Misses http://www.exherbo.org/