The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics have attracted plenty of attention and feedback over the years. Originally, each distribution-specific page was pure HTML with a third-party counter at the bottom to monitor interest of visitors. In May 2004 the site switched from publicly viewable third-party counters to internal counters. This was prompted by a continuous abuse of the counters by a handful of undisciplined individuals who had confused DistroWatch with a poll station. The counters are no longer displayed on the individual distributions pages, but all visits are logged. Only one hit per IP address per day is counted.



The DistroWatch Page Hit Ranking statistics are a light-hearted way of measuring the popularity of Linux distributions and other free operating systems among the visitors of this website. They correlate neither to usage nor to quality and should not be used to measure the market share of distributions. They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more.



The tables below display the average number of page hits for each distribution over a given period of time. To see information on page hit trends over a set period of time, please see our Page Hit Ranking Trends page. To see how our readers rank distributions based on visitor-submitted ratings, please see our Ranking page.



The figures in the third column of each table represent the average number of hits per day (HPD) for the specified period. The tables are updated daily at around 30 minutes past midnight GMT.



