After suggesting in my previous blog posting that Linux is worth trying since it is free to use and to copy, more secure and more stable than Windows, we now look at Linux distros, or distributions

I’m not going to even try to list the over three hundred Linux distributions, but hopefully clarify just what is a distribution.

The Wikipedia article on Linux distributions defines a distribution as consisting of “a Linux operating system and a collection of applications. The operating system will consist of the Linux kernel and, usually, a set of libraries and utilities from the GNU project, with graphics support from the X Window System“.
Here I may need to explain that the X-Window System is an application layer on top of the operating system kernel which provides the basic framework for building a GUI environment. On top of this is a X Window System desktop environment like KDE, GNOME, Xfce and a number of others.

A Linux distribution can be commercial (Linspire, Red Hat Enterprise Linux) or non-commercial (Debian, Slackware). What makes each Linux distribution unique is the mix of packages, which are determined by the purpose of the distribution, the type of user, hardware and a number of other factors.

These factors should be considered when choosing a Linux distribution.

Posted on May 30th, 2008 by mervyn