Distrodle

How Distrodle Works

Pick a difficulty, then guess the hidden Linux distro in as few tries as you can. Every guess is graded across 12 attributes.

• Goal: turn every cell green. That means your guess matches the target on every attribute and the round is solved.
• Difficulty sets how deep the pool goes by minimum popularity:
  • Very Easy — High and Very High popularity only. A handful of the most famous distros.
  • Easy — adds Medium popularity.
  • Medium — adds Low popularity. A noticeably bigger pool.
  • Hard — also includes Low popularity, weighted towards less common distros. The default.
  • Extreme — the complete Linux catalog, including Very Low popularity, router OSes, and obscure distros. Use the Beyond Linux toggle to add BSD and UNIX distributions (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Illumos, AIX, etc.) into the pool.
• The 12 attributes: Distro name, Paid, Init system, Release model, Parent distro, Package manager, Difficulty, Year released, Desktop, Popularity, Architecture, and Category.
• Reading the cells: green = exact match, yellow = partial match (the values overlap, e.g. a shared category or family), red = no match.
• The Year column is special: the number is followed by an arrow — ↑ means the target was released later, ↓ means it was released earlier. Use it to home in on the era.
• Hints: every 5 wrong guesses the game reveals one attribute of the target as a toast. Spend them when you're stuck.
• Discontinued is a separate toggle on top of difficulty. It adds retired distros to whichever pool you picked.
• New Game at any time skips the round and shows the previous answer. Skipping after guessing counts as a loss.
• Distrodex (in the options panel) is a searchable family tree of every distro in the game.