Linux Administration Cookbook

Understanding and choosing a distribution

Linux, as hinted at in the preceding section, is fragmented. There's no better way to describe this, due to the sheer number of different distributions you can download from a multitude of different vendors. Some of these vendors are for-profit, offering support contracts and SLAs with your purchase of their OS, and some are entirely voluntary, manned by one person in their garage.

There are literally hundreds of distributions to choose from, and each has their advocate-army to tell you why theirs is "the one true distribution" and "there's really no reason to go shopping around for a different one."

There are also Linux distributions that have been created for specific purposes, such as Red Star ...