The DistroWatch web site was first published on 31 May 2001. The concept started as a very simple table comprising of 5 major distributions and the chart only compared a few features (price, version, release date) and a few package versions (Kernel, KDE, Gnome, XFree86, Apache). Trying to make it slightly more comprehensive and useful (and failing to find anything similar and up-to-date on the Internet), I have kept adding more distributions, features and packages until the table reached fairly reasonable state in terms of information provided. At that stage, I decided to share the table with the Linux community worldwide and moved it from a spreadsheet into an HTML document

The site was established, developed and is maintained by Ladislav Bodnar, a Slovakian-born South African living in Taiwan. I attempted my first ever installation of a Linux operating system in April 1999. The Chinese say: "A one-thousand mile journey starts with a single step." Those first steps were not very easy, but the journey itself has been full of pleasant surprises, even joys and, most importantly, it has been a journey of freedom. Linux is great and this site is just a small contribution to all who enjoy it. DistroWatch has a number of active contributors - among them Dr Zhu Wen Tao, a member of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China, Susan Linton, the founder and webmaster of Tuxmachines.org, Chris Smart, the developer of the Kororaa distribution, and Robert Storey, a former writer of travel guide books and an ardent reviewer of Linux distributions.