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There are thousands of individual Linux distros. All you need to be a distro is to put together an operating system and distribute it. Hannah Montana Linux is considered a distro and all that is is Miley Cyrus scented Ubuntu. The vast majority of the time, a distro is a modification - or fork - of another distro. They form family trees in a way; for example, Linux Mint is a fork of Ubuntu which is a fork of Debian.
There are five major family trees in the GNU/Linux space: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Arch, and SuSe.
Debian is an older distribution, it was the first that shipped with an online package manager, APT. Today they favor stability and compatibility with older systems, so you might not have the latest features but Debian won’t break your workflow. If you want the Debian experience but a little more up to date, you want to use Debian Testing rather than Stable. Debian is by a good margin the biggest of the family trees, a LOT of stuff is based on Debian including Ubuntu, Mint, Elementary and Pop!_OS.
Red Hat’s big claim to fame is support for Enterprise. If you’re a big business that is going to run Linux on servers or workstations, you may want to pay for Red Hat because then you get professional support staff. Most end users and even small business types will use forks of Red Hat such as Fedora or Rocky Linux (ex CentOS). And for some reason there are Fedora Linux based gaming distros like Nobara.
Slackware and its few forks aim at being the most UNIX-like of the distros and hence they’re nowhere near as popular, there’s a certain old guard that uses it out of sheer stubbornness. The package manager makes a point of not having conflict resolution.
Arch almost breaks the distro model, or it used to at any rate. With a focus on performance and customization, what you downloaded was basically the kernel, coreutils, a shell, a text editor and a package manager. From there you were meant to install what you wanted and only what you wanted, ending up with a system that is custom to your needs and with nothing you don’t use. Nowadays with the archinstall scripts that’s been diluted somewhat but you still get the excellent Wiki and access to the AUR. Some ready-made distros based on Arch include Manjaro and EndeavourOS.
SuSe is basically like Red Hat but German. It’s developed for enterprise solutions and there are forks such as OpenSuSe that sees use on the desktop, though I don’t really encounter a lot of that in the Anglosphere.
Honorable Mention: Gentoo. A distro that is more Arch than Arch; where Arch’s whole deal is building your own OS from pre-compiled binary packages, Gentoo’s package manager distributes source code which gets compiled locally.
Hey, some of us use openSUSE. There are dozens of us!
Seriously though, Tumbleweed is a fantastic distro. If you’ve made the rounds between Arch, Fedora, and Debian distros and still aren’t satisfied, give openSUSE a try. Some things I love:
rolling and stable versions - I use Leap for servers and Tumbleweed on desktop
openQA seems to catch breakage because breakage is very rare
OBS - like the AUR, but it builds your packages on their servers
RPM - some sites still hand out debs and rpms, so that gives you an option for certain niche software
I spent 5+ years on Arch and loved it, and I’ve been on Tumbleweed for longer now. It’s pretty decent.
You’re basically correct.
There are thousands of individual Linux distros. All you need to be a distro is to put together an operating system and distribute it. Hannah Montana Linux is considered a distro and all that is is Miley Cyrus scented Ubuntu. The vast majority of the time, a distro is a modification - or fork - of another distro. They form family trees in a way; for example, Linux Mint is a fork of Ubuntu which is a fork of Debian.
There are five major family trees in the GNU/Linux space: Debian, Red Hat, Slackware, Arch, and SuSe.
Debian is an older distribution, it was the first that shipped with an online package manager, APT. Today they favor stability and compatibility with older systems, so you might not have the latest features but Debian won’t break your workflow. If you want the Debian experience but a little more up to date, you want to use Debian Testing rather than Stable. Debian is by a good margin the biggest of the family trees, a LOT of stuff is based on Debian including Ubuntu, Mint, Elementary and Pop!_OS.
Red Hat’s big claim to fame is support for Enterprise. If you’re a big business that is going to run Linux on servers or workstations, you may want to pay for Red Hat because then you get professional support staff. Most end users and even small business types will use forks of Red Hat such as Fedora or Rocky Linux (ex CentOS). And for some reason there are Fedora Linux based gaming distros like Nobara.
Slackware and its few forks aim at being the most UNIX-like of the distros and hence they’re nowhere near as popular, there’s a certain old guard that uses it out of sheer stubbornness. The package manager makes a point of not having conflict resolution.
Arch almost breaks the distro model, or it used to at any rate. With a focus on performance and customization, what you downloaded was basically the kernel, coreutils, a shell, a text editor and a package manager. From there you were meant to install what you wanted and only what you wanted, ending up with a system that is custom to your needs and with nothing you don’t use. Nowadays with the archinstall scripts that’s been diluted somewhat but you still get the excellent Wiki and access to the AUR. Some ready-made distros based on Arch include Manjaro and EndeavourOS.
SuSe is basically like Red Hat but German. It’s developed for enterprise solutions and there are forks such as OpenSuSe that sees use on the desktop, though I don’t really encounter a lot of that in the Anglosphere.
Honorable Mention: Gentoo. A distro that is more Arch than Arch; where Arch’s whole deal is building your own OS from pre-compiled binary packages, Gentoo’s package manager distributes source code which gets compiled locally.
Hey, some of us use openSUSE. There are dozens of us!
Seriously though, Tumbleweed is a fantastic distro. If you’ve made the rounds between Arch, Fedora, and Debian distros and still aren’t satisfied, give openSUSE a try. Some things I love:
I spent 5+ years on Arch and loved it, and I’ve been on Tumbleweed for longer now. It’s pretty decent.