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Cool. I know it's a dumb question, but what are considered the major distros these days? Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian?

• smt88 12y ago
  The three most popular distros are all based on Debian (Mint, Ubuntu, Debian). Ubuntu was/is intended to replace Windows, including in the enterprise. It's backed by a for-profit company called Canonical, which makes its money by offering enterprise support. The benefit of Ubuntu is that Canonical patches/supports LTS versions for a long period of time, and you can rely on those a little bit more. Another benefit is that they pay people to maintain packages, so you can always find Ubuntu repos for things. Mint is basically Ubuntu with a more "classic" desktop bundled with it. You can achieve the same thing by using XFCE or some GNOME-alternative on Ubuntu though. It really depends how deep you want to go with that stuff. DistroWatch offers a guide to choosing a distro[1] as well as a ranking in popularity[2]. I used to love Fedora, but it was too buggy for me. I've heard the latest release is fantastic, though. elementaryOS is getting a lot of buzz right now, so look into that as well. 1. http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=major 2. http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity http://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=popularity
  • tboyd47 12y ago
    Great info. Thanks!