The LinuxGratis catalogue goes from 117 to 172 operating systems today. Along the way we found that many of the versions we were showing had been frozen since July, so let’s start there.
First problem: the versions were stale
Version data mostly comes from endoflife.date, and the script that downloads it had a silly flaw: it only fetched the systems that were missing. Anything that already had a file was skipped. The result was that the Ubuntu entry still announced 26.04 from April when 26.04.1 was already out, and the kernel was stuck at 7.1.3 with 7.2.3 published.
That is fixed now. There are two separate commands: one registers new systems, the other re-queries everything already downloaded and overwrites only when the API answers with valid data. The first pass updated 26 systems:
- Ubuntu 26.04.1 (31 August), the first point release of the Resolute Raccoon LTS.
- Linux kernel 7.2.3 (2 September).
- NetBSD 11.0 (30 July), a major jump after five years on the 10 branch.
- Mageia 10 (29 June), which had been on 9 since 2023.
- OPNsense 26.7.3, Tails 7.11, VirtualBox 7.2.16, ESXi 9.1.1, macOS 26.6.2 and iOS/iPadOS 26.6.1, plus RouterOS, PAN-OS, Amazon Linux, postmarketOS and others.
Then the gaps
Checking the catalogue against the DistroWatch ranking exposed an obvious one: CachyOS has been number one for a year and a half and we did not have it. Nor Bazzite, Nobara, Garuda, Artix, KDE neon or, more embarrassing still, Kubuntu: Lubuntu and Xubuntu were there, but not the KDE flavour.
Bigger absences were still missing. Raspberry Pi OS, the system of the best-selling board in history. ChromeOS, which runs millions of laptops in schools. And Asahi Linux with its Fedora Asahi Remix, the reason an Apple Silicon Mac can boot Linux at all.
Categories that fell short
Whole sections had three or four entries when the real world has many more:
- BSD had FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD. It now adds DragonFly BSD, GhostBSD, MidnightBSD, HardenedBSD and NomadBSD.
- Unix had AIX and Solaris. It gains HP-UX, IBM i, z/OS, OpenVMS and Solaris’s three free heirs: OpenIndiana, OmniOS and SmartOS, with illumos as their common base.
- Mobile was five entries and three were Apple’s. In come GrapheneOS, CalyxOS, Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS and HarmonyOS.
- Networking adds Cisco IOS XE, F5 BIG-IP and Stormshield.
Immutable Linux arrives as a block too —Silverblue, Kinoite, Fedora CoreOS, Flatcar, Talos, Bottlerocket, Azure Linux and Vanilla OS— along with storage (TrueNAS, Unraid, OpenMediaVault, Synology DSM, NetApp ONTAP, ZimaOS) and whatever plugs into a TV or a small board: Armbian, DietPi, LibreELEC, Batocera, RetroPie and Home Assistant OS.
How they stay current
A 172-entry catalogue only ages if nobody looks at it. More than half of the new systems come from endoflife.date and refresh without intervention. For the rest we wrote readers for their official sources:
- Raspberry Pi OS comes from the foundation’s index of dated images.
- ChromeOS, from Google’s public version history API.
- OmniOS, from its schedule table, which publishes real release and end-of-support dates for every version, LTS included.
- SmartOS, OpenIndiana, GrapheneOS, Flatcar, Talos, Bottlerocket, Armbian, DietPi and LibreELEC, from their indexes and the GitHub releases API.
- deepin and Fedora Asahi Remix already had theirs since July.
Each one has a check mode: it reports a new version without touching anything.
What is still missing
Two systems were deliberately left out. For /e/OS we could only find the month of releases 4.0 and 4.1.1, not the day; for Ubuntu Core, dates that do not match the corresponding Ubuntu LTS. Rather than invent a date to fill a table, we left the gap and wrote it down.
More batches are coming: the historical systems still missing (ArcaOS, MorphOS, NetWare, Symbian, IRIX), real-time systems such as Zephyr or FreeRTOS, and the rest of the DistroWatch top. If you miss one, tell us.