Package numbers and usage. (a) Package count per language ecosystem (saturated colors on bottom represent explicitly life science related packages). (b) Distribution of per-package downloads separated by language ecosystem. The term "other" entails all packages that do not fall into one of the specific categories. White dots represent the mean, dark bars represent the interval between upper and lower quartile. (c) Comparison of explicitly life science related packages in Bioconda with Debian Med (https://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med), Gentoo Science Overlay (category sci-biology,  https://github.com/gentoo/sci), EasyBuild (module bio, https://easybuilders.github.io/easybuild), Biolinux \cite{Field2006}, Homebrew Science (tag bioinformatics, https://brew.sh), GNU Guix (category bioinformatics, https://www.gnu.org/s/guix), and BioBuilds (https://biobuilds.org). The lower panel shows the project age since the first release or commit. Note that various non-bio-related packages that started in Bioconda have since been migrated to the general-purpose conda-forge channel. Older versions of such packages still reside in the Bioconda channel, and as such are included in the download count (b). Statistics obtained Oct. 25, 2017.