Linux Distribution - Types and Trends

Types and Trends

Further information: Linux adoption and Comparison of Linux distributions

Broadly, Linux distributions may be:

  • Commercial or non-commercial;
  • Designed for enterprise users, power users, or for home users;
  • Supported on multiple types of hardware, or platform-specific, even to the extent of certification by the platform vendor;
  • Designed for servers, desktops, or embedded devices;
  • General purpose or highly specialized toward specific machine functionalities (e.g. firewalls, network routers, and computer clusters);
  • Targeted at specific user groups, for example through language internationalization and localization, or through inclusion of many music production or scientific computing packages;
  • Built primarily for security, usability, portability, or comprehensiveness.

The diversity of Linux distributions is due to technical, organizational, and philosophical variation among vendors and users. The permissive licensing of free software means that any user with sufficient knowledge and interest can customize an existing distribution or design one to suit his or her own needs.

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