简体中文
EnglishHow to Play Distrodle and Read the Green, Yellow, and Red Cells
Updated
Type a Linux distribution name into the guess box and click Guess. Each guess is graded across 12 attributes, and your goal is to turn every cell green — meaning your guess matches the hidden distro on all 12. Green is an exact match, yellow is a partial match (the values overlap, such as a shared category or family), and red is no match. The Year column works differently: it shows an arrow, where ↑ means the target was released later and ↓ means it was released earlier.
Setting Up a Round
Before your first guess, choose how deep the pool goes. Difficulty is set by minimum popularity:
| Difficulty | Pool |
|---|---|
| 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 toward less common distros (the default) |
| Extreme | The complete Linux catalog, including Very Low popularity, router OSes, and obscure distros |
Two toggles sit on top of difficulty:
- Beyond Linux adds BSD and UNIX distributions (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Illumos, AIX, and others) to the pool.
- Discontinued adds retired distros to whichever pool you picked.
Pick the difficulty that matches how much you know. If you can name the famous distros but not the obscure ones, start at Easy or Medium rather than Hard.
The 12 Attributes You're Grading
Every guess is compared on these columns: Distro name, Paid, Init system, Release model, Parent distro, Package manager, Difficulty, Year released, Desktop, Popularity, Architecture, and Category.
Read them as a process of elimination. A green cell locks that attribute in — you can stop thinking about it. A yellow cell tells you the two values share something (a category, a family) without being identical, so the target is nearby but not the same. A red cell rules the value out entirely.
Using the Year Arrows
The Year column is the one place where the number alone doesn't tell you everything. The number is followed by an arrow:
- ↑ — the target was released later than your guess.
- ↓ — the target was released earlier than your guess.
Use it to bracket the era. If you guess a 2004 distro and see ↑, every future guess should be newer than 2004. Keep halving the gap and the release year narrows quickly.
Hints and Ending a Round
Every 5 wrong guesses, the game reveals one attribute of the target as a toast. Save them for when you're stuck rather than spending guesses randomly — a revealed attribute can eliminate a whole branch of candidates.
New Game skips the round at any time and shows the previous answer. Note that skipping after you've already guessed counts as a loss, so use it to move on, not to dodge a bad start.
Checking Candidates in Distrodex
The options panel includes Distrodex, a searchable family tree and catalog of every distro in the game, with filters by category (Desktop, Server, Gaming, Security/Forensics, Enterprise, Router/Firewall, Minimal/Embedded, Privacy, Container, Source-based, Mobile, Live/Recovery, and more). When a yellow Parent distro or Category cell narrows the field, look up the family there to see which distros share it before spending another guess.
A Quick Example
Suppose you guess a distro and see: Init system green, Package manager green, Year 2004 with ↑, Category yellow, everything else red. You now know the init system and package manager exactly, that the target came out after 2004, and that its category overlaps your guess without matching. Open Distrodex, filter by the shared category, and sort mentally by release year — then guess the oldest candidate after 2004 first, since the arrow will tell you whether to move forward or back from there.