The LinuxGratis catalogue grows from 117 to 207 operating systems. Along the way we found that many of the versions we were showing had been frozen since July, and that some dates were simply wrong. Let’s start there, because that matters more.
First: the data was 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 with a file already was skipped. The result was that the Ubuntu entry still announced 26.04 from April with 26.04.1 out, and the kernel was stuck at 7.1.3 with 7.2.3 released.
Fixed, and split into two commands: one registers new systems, the other re-queries everything already downloaded. The first pass updated 26 systems, among them Ubuntu 26.04.1, kernel 7.2.3, NetBSD 11.0 — a major jump after five years — Mageia 10, OPNsense 26.7.3, Tails 7.11, ESXi 9.1.1 and macOS 26.6.2.
Then a second group turned up: the ones that are not on endoflife.date and therefore nobody refreshed. Manjaro was still on 24.2 when it is on 26.1.0, EndeavourOS on an ISO from March 2025, SteamOS anchored at “3” from 2022 when Valve is on 3.8, PureOS on 10 from 2021 with 11 Crimson out, and Guix on 1.4.0 with 1.5.0 shipped in January.
And one date that was false
Reviewing Manjaro turned up the worst of it: versions 24.1 and 24.2 carried dates of September and October 2025, when they are from October and December 2024. A full year off.
A detail gave it away: adding 25.0.3 left it sorted below 24.2. When a newer version appears below an older one in a date sort, a date is wrong. Corrected against the official announcements.
The gaps
Comparing the catalogue with 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, Omarchy or, more embarrassing still, Kubuntu: Lubuntu and Xubuntu were there, but not the KDE flavour. The other official flavours are in now too: MATE, Budgie, Studio, Kylin, Edubuntu, Cinnamon and Unity.
Bigger absences were 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
- BSD had three entries. It now adds DragonFly BSD, GhostBSD, MidnightBSD, HardenedBSD and NomadBSD.
- Unix had two. It gains HP-UX — whose standard support ended in December 2025 — 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, Stormshield, IPFire, Cumulus Linux, Sophos Firewall and FreshTomato.
- Historical brings back NetWare, Symbian, Palm OS, BeOS, IRIX, Tru64, SCO OpenServer, Xenix and MorphOS, the only one of them still publishing.
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.
A new category: Embedded
Real-time systems did not fit any existing section, so now they have their own: Zephyr, FreeRTOS, Apache NuttX, RTEMS — the one carried by ESA and NASA probes — and Fuchsia, Google’s only system without a Linux kernel.
And in historical, next to TempleOS and Plan 9, four that are still alive and had nowhere to go: SerenityOS, Redox OS, GNU Hurd and Genode.
How they stay current
A 207-entry catalogue only ages if nobody looks at it, and we now know what that looks like. Most systems come from endoflife.date and refresh without intervention. For the rest there are ten readers of their official sources: the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s index of dated images, Google’s public version history API for ChromeOS, the OmniOS schedule table — which publishes real end-of-support dates years ahead — the SmartOS listing, the GrapheneOS changelog, the GitHub releases of Flatcar, Talos, Bottlerocket, Armbian or Zephyr, and even the file names of Manjaro’s ISOs, which carry version and date.
All of it runs every morning: if something changed, the site is checked to make sure it still builds, the change is published, and a notice is opened. It also warns when a source breaks without any news, which is the silent failure that cost us two months of frozen data.
What is missing
Ten systems were deliberately left out, all for the same reason: we could not find a reliable date. For /e/OS only the month of its releases shows up, not the day. The dates for Arista EOS release trains live inside an image on their site. SONiC versions by branches with no dated tags. And TUXEDO OS currently has only a beta of its move from an Ubuntu base to Debian.
Rather than invent a date to fill a table, we left the gap and wrote it down. If you miss a system, tell us.