Why are there so many different linux distributions and how do they really differ from the users perspective?
In: Technology
There are a few different major families of Linux distros (distributions), which differ on what package management system they use. The three big options are deb, rpm, and “everything else”.
The Debian package management system is used by Debian, Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Mint, Trisquel, and many others. RPM is used by Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Fedora, openSUSE, and many others. Other systems such as Gentoo, Arch, or NixOS do their own thing.
Package management is how system software is installed. Two different distros that use the same package manager can take advantage of work that people have done for the other distro. For instance, Pop!_OS is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian — but the maintainers of Pop!_OS also take out some pieces of Ubuntu that they (and their users) don’t like, and add other features to support things their users do need.
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Another big difference between distros is whether they lean more towards commercial software or purely free software. The Free Software social movement was a big inspiration for Linux systems to take off in the first place. It focuses on making sure that users can legally share and modify the software that they use. In contrast, proprietary commercial software is sold for profit and users typically can’t modify it or share it with others.
Debian is built by a nonprofit organization and volunteers, but Ubuntu (built on top of Debian) is built by a company that wants to make money from it. So Ubuntu leans more towards commercial software than Debian. In contrast, Trisquel is even more free-software-oriented than Debian, excluding some software that doesn’t strictly adhere to free-software political principles.
Users who care about using commercial applications or games are more likely to want a distribution that’s more friendly towards proprietary software. In contrast, users who care about Free Software principles will want one that deliberately excludes proprietary software.
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Still another difference has to do with the general user interface that you get when you first install it and log in. There are different desktop environments that run on Linux, and different distros are optimized for different ones. Even though you can switch desktop environments on most distros, people care about which one is the default.
And then there are also distros that don’t have a graphical environment at all, because they are built for use on servers. If you’re running a server in AWS, GCP, or Azure (the Amazon, Google, and Microsoft cloud server services) then you don’t care about desktop environments.
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Some particular distros exist to serve certain purposes. Kali Linux is specifically built for security testing, and comes pre-installed with tools for that purpose. Tails is a system built specifically for anonymity, for users who need extra privacy protection; every time you reboot, it deliberately loses all your data!
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