Raspberry Pi Forums

As of now, Distrowatch lists Debian as #2, and OpenELEC as #66 with 197 hits/day.

The odd thing is that Raspian isn't even listed in the Top 100 distros.
Just wondering if it is being shortchanged by being incorporated into NOOBS or Debian or what?
It seems unlikely that many of the distros listed would rank above Raspian, but mebbe I don't understand the math used by Dw.

They do review & document Raspian: http://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=raspbian

That page says Raspian is getting 136 hits per day, making it #102.

Just wondering where they get their numbers, with or without NOOBS?

They are simply counting the number of page hits for each distribution on their site (e.g. the link in the OP for Raspbian). It is not a count of the number of Raspbian image downloads. The take away is that virtually nobody goes to DistroWatch to get the link for Raspbian images, they (presumably) come directly here as they should.

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.

MarkTF wrote:They simply show the number of times a distribution page on DistroWatch.com was accessed each day, nothing more.[/b][/i]

Which might be a decent way to compare the popularity of, or perhaps the rising or falling popularity of, distributions or operating systems that most people would otherwise not know anything about. Because if you know to download from the pi people or from ubuntu directly, those are obviously going to be misses in the count. But who knows where to get plan 9 or haiku? That count might be more accurate, when comparing between similar unknowns.

There's a very fair chance that they're unable to differentiate between Raspbian and DebIan since they are built from the same base.