Tinder, but for Linux distributions.
Swipe right on rolling releases. Swipe left on anything that ships GNOME 3. Find the distro that finally understands you.
This is a joke. Please do not make life decisions based on it.
Every distro on Linuxinder has a dating profile: a screenshot, a tagline written in its own voice, a short bio, a few personality tags — and one red flag it only admits to after you've already matched.
CachyOS — "Recompiled just for your CPU. Yes, that's flirting." 🚩 I'm Arch underneath. One badly timed update and you get a black screen.
Debian — "Half your exes were built on top of me." 🚩 By the time I call software ready, upstream has shipped three more.
Linux Mint — "I will never surprise you. That's the whole point." 🚩 Wayland is still 'experimental' here, and I skip releases for months.
You swipe through the deck. At the end you get a match, two runners-up, and a short read on your taste that is somehow more judgemental than it needs to be:
"You rejected everything immutable. Your match is EndeavourOS." "You swiped right on every gaming distro."
Then you share the link and let someone else find out what you're into.
There is an actual algorithm in here, which is the funniest part.
Every distro carries a handful of tags from a fixed vocabulary — rolling, stable,
immutable, beginner, terminal, diy, ricing, gaming, lightweight,
privacy, systemd-free, will-break, windows-like, mac-like, obscure, and
friends. See tag.ts for the full list of things you can
be attracted to.
MatchingAlgorithm keeps three tallies:
| Tally | Meaning |
|---|---|
preferences |
+1 per tag on a right swipe, -1 on a left swipe |
seenTags |
how often each tag has been put in front of you |
likedTags |
how often you said yes to it |
At the end, every distro in the catalogue — including the ones you never saw — is scored as the mean of its tags' preference values, and the top three are your match and runners-up. Nothing else is weighted, and that is deliberate: overthink it and it stops being funny.
The verdict lines come from the same three tallies. seenTags versus likedTags is
what lets it notice a contradiction ("you rejected every immutable distro, and your
match is immutable"), and a contradiction always outranks the generic
"you leaned hardest into X" fallback.
pnpm install
pnpm devThen open http://localhost:3000.
pnpm build && pnpm start # production
pnpm lint # eslintAppend one object to the array in distros.ts:
{
slug: "gentoo",
name: "Gentoo",
tagline: "I'll be ready in four hours. Worth the wait.",
description: "…",
release_date: new Date("2002-03-31"),
originCountry: "USA",
basedOn: "Independent",
logo_path: "/logos/gentoo.png",
screenshot_path: "/screenshots/gentoo.png",
website: "https://www.gentoo.org",
tags: [Tag.Diy, Tag.Terminal, Tag.WillBreak],
red_flag: "…",
}Drop the screenshot in public/screenshots/ — 16:9 keeps it
uncropped, since the card renders it in an aspect-video box. Tags have to come from
the Tag enum; the scoring only knows about those. No other file needs touching.
A tagline should sound like the distro talking. A red flag should be true.
Next.js 16 (App Router, React Compiler on) · React 19 · TypeScript · Tailwind CSS v4 · Motion for the swipe physics · lucide-react for icons · pnpm.
The card is deliberately shaped like a window rather than a photo — title bar, three
dots, screenshot below — because a desktop screenshot in a Tinder frame is the whole
premise in one image. Dragging is real drag: the card tilts into the throw, a glow
resolves toward like or pass as you cross the threshold, and the next two cards are
already mounted underneath so promoting one costs no network round trip.
useReducedMotion collapses all of it to instant for anyone who asked for that.
The code is MIT (see LICENSE). The artwork is not, and the difference matters if you fork this.
Tux — the penguin in the app icon — is © Larry Ewing, Simon Budig and Anja Gerwinski, and is licensed under the GNU GPL, version 2 or any later version. The notice is kept inside the SVG itself so it survives being copied out of this repo.
Desktop screenshots are credited individually in public/screenshots/ATTRIBUTION.md. Most come from DistroWatch's per-distribution pages; a handful were sourced from Wikimedia Commons under GPL or CC BY-SA, and those carry an author and a licence in that table.
Linuxinder is satire. The red flags are real complaints, but they are chosen to be unflattering rather than balanced, and the "algorithm" is fifteen lines of arithmetic over tags someone assigned by vibe. If it matches you with something, that is a suggestion to go read the distro's actual documentation, not a result.
Do not dd anything to a USB stick because a website with a flame logo told you to.
Piotr Wittig · 2026