Almost the end of the year! Here’s another reason to look at the ProtonDB data since there’s still a significant amount of movement.

Before we move to numbers, I don’t want to bore you with the usual disclaimer, but the following needs to be said nonetheless:

• This may not be representative of all types of Linux users. I’m sure this is not what your AWS engineer uses on EC2.
• This may not be completely representative of all Linux gamers either. But I’d wage this is actually a good predictor where the market is going to shift. We saw first that Manjaro was getting the boot here first, before going under pretty much everywhere.
• There may be some additional biases, due to whoever used ProtonDB.
• Flatpak is NOT a distro, but that’s what Steam reports when it’s running on Flatpak, and Flatpak being distro independent we report it as a separate environment, if that makes sense. Feel free to ignore it if you wish.
• Arch Linux is Arch Linux on desktop. The Steam Deck’s OS is reported as HoloISO, not Arch Linux, so stop trying to claim that Arch is first because of the Steam Deck! This is mainly data reported from desktop PCs, so no, SteamOS is not a thing at the moment on such machines. This may change as Valve starts providing official support beyond the Steam Deck.
• We have no relationship whatsoever with any the devs who develop the distros mentioned in the list.

Now on to the results. You might want to click on the picture to enlarge it, because it’s small.

Now on to a few comments about these developments.

CachyOS Takes Second Spot

Not unexpected, since we have been saying last time that CachyOS Seems Unstoppable, but even I am surprised at the speed of its ascension to the top of the ranking. I had a quick check at the Google Searches as well and compared to its recent competitor, the trend seems to be consistent (comparing with older, well established distros is meaningless because then you are not just measuring the interest but the support questions related to the existing community).

So what makes CachyOS so special? You already know about the specially optimized Linux kernels, the fact that it’s based on Arch, and so on. So I gave it a spin (in a VM) to better understand what was so exciting about it. The installer game me an excellent impression. Well done, with a lot of automated checks, and a very nice menu showing the different DE available to install. And that’s a lot of Desktop Environments that you can install with a single click!

I don’t remember any other distro out there making so many DE available with such a nice and easy to understand UI. Really well done. So I went for the COSMIC environment, to kill two birds with one stone and learn more about what System76 has been cooking as well.

Very solid impression so far, whenever you run pacman for the first time it will automatically benchmark all mirrors and do several tests in a row to confirm which one is indeed the fastest to use. There is a specific kernel manager application to select which kernel you want to run, and there’s a BUNCH of them!

Their package installer is surprisingly simple, but contains a list of pre-populated popular packages they have curated, to make it easier for newcomers to find what they need, instead of going through the thousands of packages available. I could go on, but you can REALLY feel the focus on a good to great user experience in many small details like that. They are exactly on the right path, and now I can better understand why it’s not just some Arch with an installer, but a well polished distro experience that uses Arch as a base.

This is even more amazing once you realize that CachyOS was not really a thing one year ago! A small thing that nobody had heard of. How things have changed!

Linux Distros: Ups and Downs

Ubuntu has reached its LOWEST share ever in September 2025, at 7.6%. Actually, I always wonder if we still need Ubuntu these days. If you want something debian-based, there’s always Mint. Ubuntu brings no value on its own, it’s not even polished, and they have stopped innovating a very long time ago.

EndeavourOS seems to be somewhat stable but it’s been losing more than a point of share over the past 3 months. This may be due to CachyOS eating up its lunch - they are on parallel lines after all.

Nobara has reached its lowest point in terms of recent share, falling down to 3% after being between 4 and 5% for quite a while.

Manjaro reaches it lowest share ever at 2.7% as well. It’s not bad, it serves no purpose anymore now that CachyOS is out there, and is better in every way compared to Manjaro. The 2.7% left are either not following the news, or remain on Manjaro as they don’t have any particular issue (for now - until the next cert update?).

So far, we haven’t seen Pop!_OS bouncing back, but things may change once they release the final version of their 24.04 release with COSMIC included.

Bazzite, Debian, Fedora, Mint, and of course Arch the king, are mostly going undisturbed by the other movements. Bazzite does stay quite strong - which comes as a surprise.

All of this in video

Here’s how the past 6 years of distro evolution look in video in less than 5 minutes. This is the same data, but it makes the progress of CachyOS even more impressive around the end when you realize the speed of its progress.

We have this video on Peertube as well if you don’t like using Google services.

That’s it for this time. We will probably skip November for an update, unless something important happens - the next checkpoint should be in December. Stay tuned.