Adventures in Linux distro land

The number of articles lately concerning the overwhelming amount of Linux distributions available is quite interesting; why now? Perhaps because Linux on the desktop is becoming a little more mainstream. Or perhaps because of the miriad number of embedded devices that use Linux ( think home automation, signage boards, NAS storage, netbooks, phones, radios, media players, industrial devices, etc. ) and that are more visible. Whatever the reason, I think it’s always been a positive thing, with the competitive nature of open source driving improvement and maturation. And open source does not need proprietary offerings as competition ( as another journalist has recently inferred ). FOSS in itself is its own competition.

Just because there are numerous distros available ( distrowatch.com keeps track of the Top100 ) doesn’t mean Joe Blogs needs to become a guru on all or most of these. Many are specialist distros catering for recovery, security, audio, media or other areas and for the most part, one can keep your eye on the top 20 for something to use within mainstream server or desktop areas.

For desktop use, Ubuntu, Mandrake, Mint, Fedora, Puppy and openSuse come to mind. On the server side Centos, RedHat, SLES, Debian and Slackware are the main choices. For Business server use ( ala Windows Server SBS ) you can look at ebox and ClearOS.

So overall, that is not an overwhelming set of choices – just enough to give you something you are comfortable with. Read reviews on each, do a test run in a virtual machine ( care of VirtualBox ) and make the switch.

Here follows a quick matrix showing the main distros in each area.