How Distrodle's Difficulty Levels and Toggles Change the Distro Pool

Distrodle narrows the answer pool in two ways: a difficulty setting that filters by minimum popularity, and two independent toggles (Beyond Linux and Discontinued) that add extra families of distributions on top of whatever difficulty you picked. Difficulty is the main dial; the toggles are add-ons. If you want a fast, famous-distro round, stay on Very Easy with both toggles off. If you want the widest possible pool, pick Extreme and turn both toggles on.

Difficulty levels: a minimum-popularity filter

Each difficulty sets a floor on how popular a distro must be to appear as the hidden answer. The site describes them as follows:

Two things are worth noting. First, Hard is the default, so a new player who never touches the setting is already on a fairly deep pool. Second, Extreme is not just "Hard plus a bit more" — it explicitly pulls in router operating systems and very obscure entries, which changes the character of the game from "name a distro you've heard of" to "reason from attribute clues about something you may never have seen."

The practical consequence: difficulty doesn't change the rules or the 12 attributes you're graded on. It only changes how likely the target is to be a household name. Lower difficulty means your prior knowledge does more of the work; higher difficulty means you lean more on the green/yellow/red feedback and the year arrows.

The Beyond Linux toggle

Beyond Linux is a separate switch that adds BSD and UNIX distributions to the pool — the site names FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Illumos, and AIX as examples. It works on top of whichever difficulty you selected, so it expands the pool rather than replacing it.

Turn it on when you're comfortable with the Linux catalog and want the extra challenge of distinguishing, say, a BSD from a Linux distro on attributes like init system, package manager, or parent. Leave it off if BSD and UNIX are unfamiliar territory, since those answers will otherwise feel like guesses with no anchor.

The Discontinued toggle

Discontinued is described as a separate toggle on top of difficulty that adds retired distros to whichever pool you picked. It is independent of Beyond Linux, so the two can be combined.

This toggle matters because a retired distro can be famous yet absent from a modern pool — turning it on reintroduces names you might know from history but wouldn't expect in a current-distro game. If your guesses keep coming back red on release year or category, a discontinued target is one explanation worth testing by enabling the toggle in a fresh round.

How the settings combine

The three controls stack, and the pool is the result of all of them:

• Difficulty sets the popularity floor for Linux distros.
• Beyond Linux adds BSD/UNIX entries to that pool.
• Discontinued adds retired entries to that pool.

So "Extreme + Beyond Linux + Discontinued" is the largest possible pool, and "Very Easy with both toggles off" is the smallest. There's no indication that the toggles override difficulty — they extend it.

A concrete example

Suppose you're on the default Hard setting and keep guessing well-known Debian-family distros, but the feedback stays mostly red and the year arrow points to an earlier era. Two adjustments are worth trying: raise difficulty to Extreme to admit very-low-popularity entries, and switch on Discontinued in case the target is a retired distro. If instead your guesses fail on attributes like init system or package manager in ways that don't fit Linux conventions, enabling Beyond Linux is the better test.

Choosing a setting for your goal

• Learning the Linux landscape: Very Easy or Easy, toggles off. You'll see names you can actually place.
• A standard challenge: Medium or Hard (the default), toggles off.
• Maximum difficulty: Extreme with Beyond Linux and Discontinued on.
• Stuck on a round: rather than changing settings mid-round, note that every 5 wrong guesses the game reveals one attribute of the target as a toast, and New Game skips the round and shows the previous answer (skipping after guessing counts as a loss).

If you want to study the pool before committing, the Distrodex in the options panel is a searchable family tree of every distro in the game, with category filters — useful for seeing what a given difficulty and toggle combination can actually produce.