Distros - jasper-zanjani/dotfiles GitHub Wiki
Fully-featured desktop environments are distinct from window managers, which are more focused in scope
Alpine Linux
Security-oriented, lightweight Linux distribution used in containers and hardware.
Arch Linux
BSD
Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) began in the 70s and was based on AT&T original code. First source distributions required user to purchase a source license from AT&T, since much of the BSD source was derivative of UNIX.
Berkeley finally released a "wholly-BSD" product as Network Release 1 in 1989, which satisfied vendor demand for the TCP/IP networking code for PC.
Work immediately began to reconstruct the remaining functionality of UNIX, which was completed in Network Release 2, released in 1991, which was based entirely on Berkeley code. Eventually this resulted in the 386BSD distribution, which then spawned five interrelated BSD distros: BSDI (now Wind River), NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin/Mac OS X
Unix System Laboratories (USL) sued BSDI after BSDI attempted to market its product as a real UNIX, and other BSD distributions were affected by disputed code. Ultimately 3 out of the 18,000 files that made up the Network Release 2 distribution were removed, which became known as 4.4BSD-lite, released in 1994. This legal dispute was partly to blame for Linux's rapid ascent in popularity. (src)
Clear Linux
Rolling release distro from Intel with a custom package management system based on bundles, collections of packages that contain everything an application requires, including dependencies. Clear's update process also has the ability to do delta downloads, preserving bandwidth. It does not provide access with unusual licenses, like ZFS, Chrome, or FFmpeg. (src)
Red Hat
Prior to the shift to CentOS Stream in December 2020:
After the shift, CentOS Stream will be considered slightly upstream to RHEL (ahead by a point-release), but downstream from Fedora.
CentOS
CentOS is a community distribution of Linux that was created by Gregory Kurtzer in 2004 and acquired by Red Hat in 2014. It has traditionally been considered downstream to RHEL, incorporating changes to RHEL after a delay of several months. In fact, it is a rebuild of the publicly available source RPMs (SRPMs) of RHEL packages, which historically allowed CentOS maintainers to simply package and ship them rebranded.
For years, CentOS was the distribution of choice for experience Linux administrators who did not feel the need to pay for Red Hat's support.
In December 2020, Red Hat announced that CentOS 8 support will end at the end of 2021 (rather than 2029), while CentOS 7 will continue to be supported until 2024. This represented a shift in focus from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream and a change from a fixed-release (or "stable point release") to a rolling-release distribution model.
CentOS Stream
CentOS Stream was announced in September 2019 as a distribution of CentOS maintained on a model previously misidentified as rolling-release but now described as "continuously delivered", organized into Streams. CentOS Stream originated in an effort to get more community participation in development of RHEL, rather than merely passive consumption.
Fedora
Fedora is a community distribution supported by Red Hat launched as "Fedora Core" in 2003. It has traditionally been considered as upstream to RHEL, serving as a testing ground for new features and improvements.
Fedora CoreOS is a Fedora edition built specifically for running containerized workloads securely and at scale. Because containers can be deployed across many nodes for redundancy, the system can be updated and rebooted automatically without affecting uptime.
CoreOS systems are meant to be immutable infrastructure, meaning they are only configured through the provisioning process and not modified in-place. All systems start with a generic OS image, but on first boot it uses a system called Ignition to read an Ignition config (which is converted from a Fedora CoreOS Config file) from the cloud or a remote URL, by which it provisions itself, creating disk partitions, file systems, users, etc.
CoreOS automatically installs upgrades automatically without user intervention, although they can be stopped if a problem is found.
RHEL
Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is Red Hat's commercial Linux distribution.
Canonical
Ubuntu
SUSE
OpenSUSE Leap
OpenSUSE Leap is a rebuild of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, similar to how CentOS was historically a rebuild of RHEL.
SLES
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) ("slee") is SUSE's fixed-release distribution of Linux intended for enterprises, and as such is comparable to Red Hat's RHEL.