Does Distrowatch do this?
this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2025
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Debian has a package called popcon (Popularity Contest) which tracks package usage.
You can search a package name. I made an example graph showing web browser usage. This may not be fully accurate because it isn't showing proprietary browser such as Chrome or Brave.
Repology might kinda help for your use case. It lets you search for software that is packaged on many different "families" of distributions. You can also filter by category.
Admittedly it does kinda depends on your definition of popularity. But it's good at answering these questions:
- Is this widely regarded as free software?
- Has it been around for a while?
- Is it useful enough to have been packaged in many places?
GitHub
Using apps by popularity instead of on their actual usefulness is pretty wild.
The logic is that the most useful app will be the most popular by virtue of its utility.
Not always true but I’m sure there’s some correlation.
Popular projects get more attention, more contributions and donations, and as a result are fast to add features, fix bugs and have a larger community to help each other. I would choose a program that's comparatively simple and stable than a program packed with features I really like, but full of bugs. I don't think it's unreasonable to consider popularity as a metric to choose apps
Don't forget if a previously popular application starts to become unpopular its typically for a good reason! So watching downward trends can also clue you into issues or problems you would not have other wise known.
People dislike change so it takes something decently serious to actually halt momentum.
It’s “what alternatives exist and how can I find them?”, not “I only install popular apps.
I mean, yes, but I don't think anyone is intending to do use packages only based one factor. Popularity is a reasonable heuristic for quality and long-term continued support. And my reading of OP is that they're trying to gauge the popularity to use it for that. I think it's also a decent enough measure for discovery, since usefulness (hopefully) should correlate with popularity and the latter is more measurable.
I usually use these lists to find new stuff. Especially tools on steam deck are way to find that way.
The popcon package in Debian gives the same details IIRC.
Alternativeto but it doesn't directly show popularity
I don't know of a service that tracks all major repositories to calculate a single popularity index. They are not really comparable to each other anyway.
Depending on what type of application you search for, I think "Flathub" could be one major source. It's a pretty popular "platform" and not dependent on a certain distribution. There are "Trending" and "Popular" categories too. It's excellent to find some new software (or to remind an older one exist) in my opinion. You don't even need to install the Flatpak and can do it from Archlinux repositories (or the AUR if you prefer).
You wouldn’t need to track them all, any distro’s installed package distribution (statistical, not Linux distro) should be strongly correlated with all of the others.
Just like how you can poll a large crowd based on the opinions of a few thousand people. Arch is a good place to look since all packages are explicitly chosen by the user while in other distros the default software packages ensure that their repo stats will be skewed.
When I’m looking into alternatives, I usually just search social media and note the things people recommend. The software ecosystem is small enough that this method isn’t (yet) polluted by bots promoting software.
I'm surpised that #Discord is still the most popular instant messaging app, even on Arch #Linux:
https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun/Instant%20Messaging%20Clients/current
These guys should really fix their app.