all the number ones

A little history for ya. The No. 1 distros for each calendar year, according to the page hit rankings at DistroWatch:

2002 - Mandrake
2003 - Mandrake
2004 - Mandrakelinux
2005 - Ubuntu
2006 - Ubuntu
2007 - Ubuntu
2008 - Ubuntu
2009 - Ubuntu
2010 - Ubuntu
2011 - Mint
2012 - Mint
2013 - Mint
2014 - Mint
2015 - Mint
2016 - Mint
2017 - Mint
2018 - Manjaro

There's a good chance that MX Linux will be the No. 1 for 2019.

The Top 20 distros for 2005, when I first got going with Linux (I was running Linspire and playing around with KNOPPIX; I switched to MEPIS later), according to DistroWatch's page hit rankings:

And the Top 20 over the past 30 days:

How things have changed! Note that Debian comes in at #6 on both lists.