Tuxery
Docs· How rankings work

How rankings work

Every list on Tuxery is ordered by a signal a source actually publishes. This page says which one, for each list. Two rules apply everywhere:

  • Nothing is paid placement. No app can buy its way into a list.
  • No signal means no rank. An app without a figure is left out of a ranked list, not ranked last: having no data says nothing about an app.

Trending, category and store lists also only show apps with an icon, so a row doesn't fill up with blank cards.

Ordered by popularity, a score between 0 and 1 built from the sources that publish one:

  • the AUR's own popularity figure (how often Arch users install the package through AUR helpers), ranked as a percentile across the AUR;
  • Flathub's "Popular" list, the same one flathub.org shows, scored by position — only its top 250.

When an app has both, the two are averaged. Each source's figure is scaled within that source first, since the raw numbers can't be compared directly. Apps found only in sources that publish no popularity figure (Debian, Fedora, the Snap Store, GOG...) can't appear here, however popular they are elsewhere — which answers most "why isn't X trending?" questions.

The same score orders each store page's trending row, restricted to the apps that store carries.

New games

Ordered by the date of the newest release, as the game's own AppStream metadata states it. Only Flathub and elementary AppCenter publish that date today, so this row only covers games found there. A "New apps" row will follow once more sources carry a release date.

Ordered by installs over the last 7 days — not all-time totals, which would always favor long-established apps over the ones people are picking up right now. The figure comes from Flathub's public statistics, so it counts Flathub installs only: it says what Flathub users install, not what all Linux users install. No other source publishes download counts.

Category rows

Rows such as "Productivity apps" or "Puzzle games" list apps of one category, popularity-scored apps first, then alphabetically — so a category with no scored app still shows something.

Must-have apps and creator picks

Must-have apps on the homepage is an editorial list: about fifteen widely used apps (Firefox, VLC, LibreOffice, GIMP...), chosen by hand by the Tuxery team. Creator pages list the apps one person actually uses, chosen by them. Both are opinions, and say so.

Stores also publish their own selections (Flathub's recently added and recently updated apps, the Snap Store's featured snaps). Tuxery records them but doesn't show them as rankings yet; Flathub's verified list is used for the Verified badge.

Search and browse

Search results are ordered by relevance to what you typed: an exact name match first, then names starting with your words, then matches in the name and description, with shorter, closer names ahead of long ones (so "zen browser" finds the Zen browser before its extensions). Popularity plays no part in search. Browse lists without a search are alphabetical.

How often lists change

Sources are refetched weekly. The lists are recomputed each time the catalog is republished from that data, so they move in steps, not continuously; the date of the current data is on the Status page.

Planned

  • Popularity from more sources, so trending stops leaning on Arch and Flathub users.
  • Votes from Tuxery users, to surface apps no source ranks.
  • More editorial picks, checked per creator and per source.