Congratulations to Linux Mint Cinnamon: our first ever Distro Madness Champion. Cinnamon was a consistent performer, being well liked in every round and eventually coming out on top with 75% of the vote in our final round. Linux Mint Mate was certainly a worthy runner-up but fell just short.
A critic will say that we spent three months finding out that a group largely recruited from the Linux Mint community preferred Linux Mint as its distribution and Mint’s most popular desktop environment amongst the various Mint flavours. Next year I think that we will need to reach out to other communities and restructure our tournament to get the most out of this exercise.
But I personally had a lot of fund watching the results each week and seeing which other distributions had caught our community’s eye. In several cases, such as Feren OS, seeing the popularity of a distribution caused me to give it a second look.
I hope that our readers and voters took as much from this as I did. Now that we are complete I know that many of you will be curious about the results as a whole. While we know that Linux Mint was the most popular distribution, what about the others that contributed multiple DEs to the competition? Ubuntu fairly convincingly finished with the second most total votes but it is worth noting that Manjaro achieved its total with only two entrants (XFCE and KDE). Thus Manjaro seems to be fairly popular amongst our group. I’ve often referred to Manjaro as “Linux Mint for the Arch base”: maybe there is some merit to that?
| Distro | Total Votes | Votes/DE |
| Linux Mint | 424 | 106 |
| Ubuntu | 223 | 32 |
| Fedora | 132 | 26 |
| Debian | 111 | 22 |
| Manjaro | 110 | 55 |
For those who really want to delve in to the results I have also included a sorted table with every distribution and the total votes it gained across the whole competition below.
| Rank | Distro | Total Votes |
| 1 | Mint Cinnamon | 139 |
| 2 | Mint Mate | 114 |
| 3 | Mint XFCE | 100 |
| 4 | MX Linux | 83 |
| 5 | Solus | 77 |
| 6 | LMDE | 71 |
| 7 | Ubuntu | 62 |
| 8 | Manjaro XFCE | 61 |
| 9 | Fedora-GNOME | 53 |
| 10 | Debian-GNOME | 50 |
| 11 | Arch | 50 |
| 12 | Xubuntu | 49 |
| 13 | Manjaro KDE | 49 |
| 14 | OpenSUSE | 46 |
| 15 | Kubuntu | 45 |
| 16 | Pop!_OS | 44 |
| 17 | elementary OS | 43 |
| 18 | Zorin OS | 42 |
| 19 | Debian Plasma | 40 |
| 20 | Ubuntu Mate | 40 |
| 21 | UbuntuDDE | 38 |
| 22 | Ubuntu Budgie | 38 |
| 23 | KDE neon | 38 |
| 24 | Lubuntu | 34 |
| 25 | TAILS | 34 |
| 26 | Endeavour OS | 33 |
| 27 | Fedora Plasma | 32 |
| 28 | Ubuntu Unity | 30 |
| 29 | Feren OS | 30 |
| 30 | CentOS | 30 |
| 31 | Peppermint OS | 30 |
| 32 | Fedora LXQt | 24 |
| 33 | Rocky Linux | 16 |
| 34 | PCLinuxOS | 15 |
| 35 | Bodhi Linux | 15 |
| 36 | Garuda | 15 |
| 37 | Kali Linux | 14 |
| 38 | Debian Mate | 14 |
| 39 | Red Hat | 13 |
| 40 | Mageia | 13 |
| 41 | Sparky Linux | 13 |
| 42 | Fedora Cinnamon | 13 |
| 43 | Ubuntu Studio | 12 |
| 44 | Linux Lite | 12 |
| 45 | Slackware | 11 |
| 46 | Parrot OS | 11 |
| 47 | OpenMandriva | 11 |
| 48 | AntiX | 11 |
| 49 | Fedora XFCE | 10 |
| 50 | Raspberry Pi OS (Raspbian) | 10 |
| 51 | Deepin | 10 |
| 52 | Gecko Linux | 10 |
| 53 | Puppy Linux | 9 |
| 54 | Scientific Linux | 9 |
| 55 | Gentoo | 7 |
| 56 | Nitrux | 7 |
| 57 | Debian LXDE | 7 |
| 58 | Alpine | 7 |
| 59 | Sabayon Linux | 7 |
| 60 | Oracle Linux | 5 |
| 61 | PureOS | 5 |
| 62 | Chromium OS | 5 |
| 63 | Ubuntu Kylin | 3 |
| 64 | Slax | 1 |
Thanks again everyone for your participation. Looking forward to bringing this back “bigger and better” in 2022.
Cheers