After an extended voting period, the first round of Distro Madness is now concluded. Voting for round #2 is now open
Here are the results to date with some thoughts to follow

The first thing that I noticed was that Linux Mint ended up in a surprisingly competitive race. It was by no means a nail biter but this was the champion from last year and Void linux took 3 votes from it while other distros such as Debian, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Zorin and Pop OS all had “perfect” rounds.
Round #1 rarely gives many upsets because of our seeding process however there were a few upsets based on the initial rankings. Deepin took down Endeavour OS in a mild surprise, Red Hat fell to Linux Lite by 4 votes and Ubuntu Studio slipped past Kali Linux in two 8 vs 9 matchups. Scientific Linux defeating CentOS (residual hard feelings from the switch to CentOS Stream last year? and Nitrux defeating KDE Neon were both upsets but the most shocking result was Arco Linux defeating Kubuntu (handily). It seems that our voters are not big fans of Plasma.
On to round 2 where the feature matchup is Lubuntu vs Ubuntu Mate.