Linux Distros for Everyone: Community, Desktop, Hardcore Geek...

July 10, 2007
By

Bruce Byfield

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Browse the full list of Linux distributions, or jump to the category based on the following list: Commercial, Community, Compact, Desktop, Graphics and Music, Hardcore Geek, Hardware Oriented, Live, Education, Philosophically Free, Security, Miscellaneous.

Commercial Distros

Free software is supposed to be about do-it-yourself. All the same, many potential users of GNU/Linux, particularly in business, prefer the comfort of a traditional relationship with a software vendor. For these users, commercial distributions are the solution, offering support contracts, training, and other services that make free software more acceptable to business.

Linspire: Originally called Lindows, Linspire is a commercial version of Debian. It is known for its blending of free and proprietary applications, especially in its CNR warehouse, which uses a GUI version of Debian's apt-get. In the past, it has supported a number of free software projects. More recently, it has made headlines for doing collaborative development with Microsoft to improve cross-platform compatibility.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux: The best-known commercial distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux is built on Fedora, a community-based distro strongly supported by Red Hat. Just as in the past, the conventional wisdom was that you couldn't go wrong buying IBM or Microsoft, so many businesses feel that, when it comes to GNU/Linux, Red Hat is the company you should deal with. Some proprietary applications are designed to work only with Red Hat, although that attitude seems to be fading recently. Red Hat is also known for frequent support of free software projects, and seems to work hard to retain good relations in the community.

Suse Linux Enterprise: One of the major commercial distributions, Suse, a product owned by Novell offers complete business packages, including training and support. Recently, it has become controversial due to the deal it struck with Microsoft in November 2006, which included not only cross-platform development for increased compatibility, but also the redistribution of SuSE by Microsoft. In fact, two paragraphs of the newly-released third version of the GNU General Public License were added to prevent such deals in the future. However, Novell seems to be slowly living down that deal, at least in business circles.

Xandros: Originally built with code from Corel Linux -- itself based on Debian -- Xandros started as a general purpose distribution. More recently, it has been positioning itself as a server distribution as well, and -- with a recent, still largely unknown agreement with Microsoft -- as a developer of cross-platform management tools.