I often use pkgstats to check the popularity of Arch packages I use. Sometimes I notice a package is declining in popularity, and I’d like to find similar alternatives that are trending instead. Something like https://pkgstats.archlinux.de/fun
Are there any sites that categorize Linux software and show popularity within each category, so it’s easier to discover alternatives?
I don’t know of a service that tracks all major repositories to calculate a single popularity index. They are not really comparable to each other anyway.
Depending on what type of application you search for, I think “Flathub” could be one major source. It’s a pretty popular “platform” and not dependent on a certain distribution. There are “Trending” and “Popular” categories too. It’s excellent to find some new software (or to remind an older one exist) in my opinion. You don’t even need to install the Flatpak and can do it from Archlinux repositories (or the AUR if you prefer).
You wouldn’t need to track them all, any distro’s installed package distribution (statistical, not Linux distro) should be strongly correlated with all of the others.
Just like how you can poll a large crowd based on the opinions of a few thousand people. Arch is a good place to look since all packages are explicitly chosen by the user while in other distros the default software packages ensure that their repo stats will be skewed.
When I’m looking into alternatives, I usually just search social media and note the things people recommend. The software ecosystem is small enough that this method isn’t (yet) polluted by bots promoting software.