Downloads of most OSS software is so heavily skewed by CI pipelines, but I'm not sure what shape that follows. Maybe it's an exponential curve where the more popular you are the more CI systems you're in so the exponentially more downloads you have. Maybe that's useful but I'm not sure.
It would heavily favor distros that require major upgrades every six months or whatever over rolling release distros.
With Gentoo, the ISO doesn't matter. You can use any bootable linux distro. I generally used knoppix back in the day, these days I generally use systemrescuecd. I installed Gentoo using the Ubuntu installation disk once because it was the first bootable linux disk I saw. I've used Gentoo as my primary OS for almost two decades and I've only ever downloaded an ISO maybe 5 times.
Downloads of most OSS software is so heavily skewed by CI pipelines, but I'm not sure what shape that follows. Maybe it's an exponential curve where the more popular you are the more CI systems you're in so the exponentially more downloads you have. Maybe that's useful but I'm not sure.
That wouldn't work either.
It would heavily favor distros that require major upgrades every six months or whatever over rolling release distros.
With Gentoo, the ISO doesn't matter. You can use any bootable linux distro. I generally used knoppix back in the day, these days I generally use systemrescuecd. I installed Gentoo using the Ubuntu installation disk once because it was the first bootable linux disk I saw. I've used Gentoo as my primary OS for almost two decades and I've only ever downloaded an ISO maybe 5 times.
Gentoo barely has an ISO download; in fact my most recent installations I just used an Ubuntu live CD iirc.
I don't need a latest Gentoo image to bootstrap a new system. The stage3 is more important, and that can come from dozens of mirrors.
Edit: I download a new image like once a year.