Monday, November 1, 2010

The Linux distro timeline is an extensive family tree of all things Linux

The Linux distro timeline is an extensive family tree of all things Linux

Filed under: Linux, Education

linuxdistrotimeline

Most commercial products run a fairly set course; you get Microsoft Office 1.5, then 1.6, 3.0, 4.0, all the way up to office 2010 (For Windows, at least). It's a fairly orderly progression, with version numbers rising over time - pretty easy to follow.

Open-source projects are a different beast, however. When enough developers don't like the direction a project is going, they sometimes just create a fork and go on developing their own product. Sometimes projects have to fork for legal reasons, and sometimes it's a business decision, too.

The bottom line is that if you could plot the Linux timeline, it would look more like a crazy family tree than like an orderly progression of versions. And what do you know, one Donjan Rodic has gone and done just that, in the form of the GNU/Linux distro timeline.

Since this is an SVG file, it's not just a static image, and is capable of all sorts of aweosme: you can use Ctrl-F to search for a specific distro, and when you click a distro's name, you are transported to its home page.

Of course, since is this such a nerdy project, it wasn't produced entirely by hand. Donjan created an application just for creating the map, and then went ahead and open-sourced it. So... who wants to use it to create a timeline of all Web browsers?

The Linux distro timeline is an extensive family tree of all things Linux originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 31 Oct 2010 14:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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