I often use pkgstats to check the popularity of Arch packages I use. Sometimes I notice a package is declining in popularity, and I’d like to find similar alternatives that are trending instead. Something like https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun
Are there any sites that categorize Linux software and show popularity within each category, so it’s easier to discover alternatives?
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?
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.
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).
